By: Michael S (already5chosen.delete@this.yahoo.com), July 1, 2013 4:11 pm
Room: Moderated Discussions
rwessel (robertwessel.delete@this.yahoo.com) on July 1, 2013 3:39 pm wrote:
> Michael S (already5chosen.delete@this.yahoo.com) on July 1, 2013 8:57 am wrote:
> > anon (anon.delete@this.anon.com) on July 1, 2013 1:45 am wrote:
> > >
> > > The ironic part of this is that Linus believes in the market when it suits his worldview
> > > ("market decided x86 is better than xyz despite some bickering from people in ivory towers,
> > > therefore your technical arguments are simply masturbation"). On the other hand, he is quite
> > > sure that the market is wrong to be driving floating point performance in this way.
> > >
> >
> > IMHO, not less ironic is that the rant came from designer of the OS that after
> > 20 years of intensive development succeeded to become the industry standard in
> > one and only one major field of computing - massively-parallel FP calculations.
>
>
> I'm quite sure that Linux burns an order of magnitude more cycles running web
> servers and phones than supporting "massively-parallel FP calculations".
But Linux does not dominate web serving and phones (BTW, is Android still Linux enough to be considered Linux?) to nearly the same degree it dominates "massively-parallel FP calculations".
Let's do a thought experiment: tomorrow Linux disappears.
I'd suppose, that migration of web serving to other OSes would be trivial. Linux looks to me as by far the least critical component of LAMP and similar bundle.
For Android, replacing the kernel would take more work and, may be, the product will lose one or two of less popular HW platforms in the process, but apps, which are the main value, will remain mostly (or completely) unaffected.
On the other hand, "massively-parallel FP calculations" field would be heavily impacted, because here quite often users programs depends on Linux-specific details, rather than on higher level portable abstractions. And even when users programs do depend on abstractions, implementations of these abstractions on non-Linux platforms are often either unavailable or far less mature. Or available and mature, but on less cost-effective hardware.
> Michael S (already5chosen.delete@this.yahoo.com) on July 1, 2013 8:57 am wrote:
> > anon (anon.delete@this.anon.com) on July 1, 2013 1:45 am wrote:
> > >
> > > The ironic part of this is that Linus believes in the market when it suits his worldview
> > > ("market decided x86 is better than xyz despite some bickering from people in ivory towers,
> > > therefore your technical arguments are simply masturbation"). On the other hand, he is quite
> > > sure that the market is wrong to be driving floating point performance in this way.
> > >
> >
> > IMHO, not less ironic is that the rant came from designer of the OS that after
> > 20 years of intensive development succeeded to become the industry standard in
> > one and only one major field of computing - massively-parallel FP calculations.
>
>
> I'm quite sure that Linux burns an order of magnitude more cycles running web
> servers and phones than supporting "massively-parallel FP calculations".
But Linux does not dominate web serving and phones (BTW, is Android still Linux enough to be considered Linux?) to nearly the same degree it dominates "massively-parallel FP calculations".
Let's do a thought experiment: tomorrow Linux disappears.
I'd suppose, that migration of web serving to other OSes would be trivial. Linux looks to me as by far the least critical component of LAMP and similar bundle.
For Android, replacing the kernel would take more work and, may be, the product will lose one or two of less popular HW platforms in the process, but apps, which are the main value, will remain mostly (or completely) unaffected.
On the other hand, "massively-parallel FP calculations" field would be heavily impacted, because here quite often users programs depends on Linux-specific details, rather than on higher level portable abstractions. And even when users programs do depend on abstractions, implementations of these abstractions on non-Linux platforms are often either unavailable or far less mature. Or available and mature, but on less cost-effective hardware.
