Patrick Chase (patrickjchase.delete@this.hp.com) on November 23, 2013 3:54 pm wrote:
> Jeff K (jeffk.delete@this.smthng.awfl.com) on November 22, 2013 7:17 am wrote:
> > I suppose a new custom core is the best guess, but is it possible to have some kind of hybrid of cores?
> > Like, say, clusters of 8 KNC cores for throughput + 1 Core core for the heavy lifting + a LLC slice?
> > Impossible to tune the softwares to fit something like that? Or just a bad idea to begin with?
>
> Judging by the raging success that was Cell, I'd say it's both "impossible
> to tune the software" AND "just a bad idea to begin with".
>
> Of course as with everything there are counter-arguments:
>
> 1. CPU + GPU systems effectively behave as you describe today. In a prior job I architected
> the datapath for a very large/fast (multi-million dollar, many billions of pixels/sec) imaging
> system, and I partitioned the work between Xeons and GPUs basically as you describe.
>
> 2. In addition to having a heterogeneous architecture, Cell went out of its way
> to make development for the SPEs difficult. You could therefore reasonably argue
> that its problems were as much in the implementation as in the context.
^^^^^^^
s/context/concept