Jecel Assumpcao Jr wrote:
> One option is to wait for the Wheel of Hardware Reincarnation to crank
> through a couple of more steps giving us a huge number of processors,
> all alike. Then we are back to the subject of this thread :-)
>
> http://www.cap-lore.com/Hardware/Wheel.html

Hi Jecel,

Sweet.

Fortunately the cycle is swinging back around with the Tile-64 (and 
Tile-N) core processors that are just now being released. Also Intel has 
a similar 80-core chip that they've showed off but isn't slated for 
production (quite yet). The general purpose highly connected chips using 
on chip networks to communicate are likely the way of the future. Intel 
will eventually produce X86-64 variants (and hopefully Itanium's) that 
have N-cores where N is 64 or larger - maybe sooner than we think.

The next steps of N-core and N-threading design for Squeak and Smalltalk 
are crucial.

Even the magical Erlang way of concurrency won't solve real world issues 
such as multiple processes contending for limited hardware resources. 
These need synchronization. No one answered Igor's point on this.

It would still be nice if someone who is supporting the Erlangisation 
(or is that Erlangization) of Smalltalk's processes to write up a 
complete description of what they are actually proposing. It makes 
debating it easier. Thanks.

All the best,

Peter