On 7/5/08, Peter William Lount <peter at smalltalk.org> wrote:
> Hi,
>
> Intel among others such as Tilera and NVidia are telling us - yes us
> smalltalkers - to prepare for tens, hundreds and thousands of cores on a
> single chip. It's up to us to bring this power to our end users - and
> ourselves too!
>
> Intel Says to Prepare For "Thousands of Cores"
> http://hardware.slashdot.org/hardware/08/07/02/1833221.shtml
> http://news.cnet.com/8301-13924_3-9981760-64.html?part=rss&subj=news&tag=2547-1_3-0-5
>
> What would be nice for a new version of squeak/croquet:
>
> HydraVM rewritten in Igor's new improved lambda+slang+exupery bypassing C
> altogether yet interfacing and generating C or Java or Javascript or Flash
> or ... as well for those deployment scenarios where that makes sense.
>
> To take advantage of multi-core what is needed is real native
> multi-threading per virtual machine + image not simply one native thread per
> image. Both are good for various application scenarios. Remember that a real
> multi-native threaded image can always just run one native thread if you
> want it too while a single native thread virtual machine + image will not
> run multiple native threads in the same image space. Sure multiple images in
> one program memory space is nice for some scenarios. I like that too and
> desire the option to deploy that way with multiple native threads per image
> space in one program memory space.
>
> All the best,
>
> Peter

If you mean what I think you mean (fine grained shared state
multi-threading) then I find this a pretty ironic message: "the
multi-cores on upon us, we need to hurry up and adapt the method of
concurrent program that absolutely wont work on 1k+ cores".

The whole reason the "mega-cores" are interesting is that we have to
*change how we program them*.  Interesting how you are pointing out
later in this thread about others "not getting it" while managing to
miss this sky scraper size billboard.