PRAM CPU "helps bring general-purpose parallel computing closer to reality" MS rep.

[Brimstone]

Last week the professor was at Microsoft's invitation-only Workshop on Many-Core Computing. Microsoft Technical Fellow Burton Smith figures the device can "exploit a wider spectrum of parallel algorithms than today's microprocessors can and this in turn will help bring general-purpose parallel computing closer to reality."

Smith was in Dresden at the International Supercomputing Conference the other day saying that computing has got to be reinvented so garden-variety programs execute in parallel in multiple microprocessor cores to pave the way for speech, conversation, rich visualization and anticipatory execution of tasks. He urged commercial vendors to work with the academe.

http://virtualization.sys-con.com/read/399998.htm



Sounds like a big breakthrough in CPU design by Professor Uzi Vishkin & people at Microsoft are at least aware of it.

 

[inefficient]

Technology from the 80's really.

But with 1,024 cores, how the hell are you suppose to feed that kind of chip with data? It's one thing to have array of FPGAs clocked at 75mhz. It's a totally different thing to have a chip in production at 1-2Ghz.

Anyway what does this have to do with consoles. Consoles are not general purpose devices!

 

[Npl]

sounds like a mix of exploiting instruction-level parrallelism and hyperthreading (much like GPUs), which aint exactly "parallel programming" in my book.

As it stands Professor Vishkin's Delaware-based company XMTT Inc owns the patents on the unnamed chip and he reckons he's a league ahead of Intel - at least in being ready to explain how parallel computing can be easy to program.

Well, its a guy trying to sell his stuff for big bucks. Unless theres more known about his CPU, Im highly skeptical this is a big thing but a big amount of hype. It doesnt sound like your single-threaded program would benefit greatly from it.