Comment by jbverschoor
3 years ago
I sometimes wonder about how fast tings could go if we ditch the firmware, and also just bake a kernel / os right into the silicon. Not like all the subsystems which run their own os/kernels, but really just cut every layer, and have nothing in between.
You'd find yourself needing to add more CPUs to account for all the low level handling that is done by various coprocessors for you, eating into your compute budget, especially with high interrupt ratio as you wouldn't have it abstracted and batched in the now missing coprocessors
It'd be slower. These coprocessor OSes are there to improve performance in the first place.
(Especially because wall clock time is not the only kind of performance that matters.)
Then you can't improve them.