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?

Cheers,

peter