2008/7/6 Peter William Lount <peter at smalltalk.org>:
> Todd Blanchard wrote:
>>
>> This was pretty much the messages from Apple at WWDC recently as well.
>> Their next os version has several technologies based around this idea.
>> The shift is upon us.
>>
>
> Yeah, Apple is talking about two different approaches - program parallelism
> with multi-cores and data parallelism with GPGPUs from the likes of NVidia
> and AMD-ATI or possibly P.A.Semi (just a wild guess on P.A.Semi as their
> chips could be made with many many cores soon).
>
> And NO Smalltalk hasn't caught up yet. Just half a year ago in this very
> forum thread people were arguing against generic fully multi-threading of
> Smalltalk virtual machines. Cincom is against it. Instantiantions has been
> quite and likely won't do much.
>
> Only a few brave intrepid explorers get it and now we have experiments like
> HydraVM for croquet/squeak.
>
> Most smalltalks and smalltalkers are deeply stuck in the past of one native
> thread. Most in fact are not good at multi-threading with smalltalk
> non-native threads!!! It's difficult to learn and get right which is one
> motivator behind those wanting to take the easy road - one native thread per
> image, but that's the wrong route (in my view and obviously in others view
> as well) because it isn't general purpose enough. It involves hard work. No
> way around it.
>
> Igor, how will we gain access to writing for chips like NVidia when they
> keep it all secret? Use C with CUDA? Or hyjack OpenCL (to be part of LLVM
> and clang frontend if I'm not mistaken) when Apple gets it working?
>

You mean writing code for GPUs? Well, as the rest of the world:
provide/generate a source code and let GPU vendor API compile it.
If they don't open their chip architecture/instructions, how else it
can be done?

> Cheers,
>
> peter
>
>
>



-- 
Best regards,
Igor Stasenko AKA sig.