Re: Anticipating processor architectural evolution

Apr 28, 2024 Last reply: 2 years ago 5 Replies


I've had to refactor my RTOS design to accommodate the likelihood of SMT


>in future architectures.
>
>Thinking (hoping?) these logical cores to be the "closest to the code",
>I call them "Processors" (hysterical raisins). Implicit in SMT is the
>notion that they are architecturally similar/identical.
>
>These are part of PHYSICAL cores -- that I appropriately call "Cores". >
>These Cores are part of "Hosts" (ick; term begs for clarity!)... what
>one would casually call "chips"/CPUs. Note that a host can house dissimilar
>Cores (e.g., big.LITTLE).
>
>Two or more hosts can be present on a "Node" (the smallest unit intended to
>be added to or removed from a "System"). Again, they can be dissimilar
>(think CPU/GPU).
>
>I believe this covers the composition/hierarchy of any (near) future
>system architectures. And, places the minimum constraints on said. >
>Are there any other significant developments in the pipeline that
>could alter my conception of future hardware designs?

Why not hundreds of CPUs on a chip, each assigned to one function, with absolute hardware protection? They need not be identical, because many would be assigned to simple functions.


The mess we have now is the legacy of thinking about a CPU as some precious resource.

The "mess" we have now reflects the fact that we are less constrained than we used to be.

As soon as you could do multi-threaded processing life became more complicated, but you could do a great deal more.

Anything complicated will look like a mess if you don't understand what's going on - and if you aren't directly involved why would you bother to do the work that would let you understand what was going on?

If would be nice if we could find some philosophical high ground from which all the various forms of parallel processing could be sorted into a coherent taxonomy, but the filed doesn't seem to have found its Carl Linnaeus yet.

Isn't this what Waferscale is, kinda ?

boB

Vaguely related:

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A PC doesn't solve massively parallel computational problems.

One CPU can be a disk file server. One, a keyboard handler. One for the mouse. One can be the ethernet interface. One CPU for each printer. One would be the "OS", managing all the rest.

Cheap CPUs can run idle much of the time.

We don't need to share one CPU doing everything any more. We don't need virtual memory. If each CPU has a bit of RAM, we barely need memory management.

Why virtual processors, if real ones are cheap?

Because you can reconfigure them on the fly, which is harder with real processors.

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