Comment by rahkiin
8 days ago
Given enough power and space efficiency you would start putting multiple cpus together for specialized tasks. Distributed computing could have looked differently
8 days ago
Given enough power and space efficiency you would start putting multiple cpus together for specialized tasks. Distributed computing could have looked differently
This is more or less what we have now. Even a very pedestrian laptop has 8 cores. If 10 years ago you wanted to develop software for today’s laptop, you’d get a 32-gigabyte 8-core machine with a high-end GPU. And a very fast RAID system to get close to an NVMe drive.
Computers have been “fast enough” for a very long time now. I recently retired a Mac not because it was too slow but because the OS is no longer getting security patches. While their CPUs haven’t gotten twice as fast for single-threaded code every couple years, cores have become more numerous and extracting performance requires writing code that distributes functionality well across increasingly larger core pools.
Half my Linux machines are Macs “retired” for exactly this reason.
This was the Amiga. Custom coprpcessors for sound, video, etc.
Commodore 64 and Ataris had intelligent peripherals. Commodore’s drive knew about the filesystem and could stream the contents of a file to the computer without the computer ever becoming aware of where the files were on the disk. They also could copy data from one disk to another without the computer being involved.
Mainframes are also like that - while a PDP-11 would be interrupted every time a user at a terminal pressed a key, IBM systems offloaded that to the terminals, that kept one or more screens in memory, and sent the data to another computer, a terminal controller, that would, then, and only then, disturb the all important mainframe with the mundane needs or its users.
Ya...IBM and CDC both had/have architectures that heavily distributed tasks to subprocessors of various sorts. Pretty much dates to the invention of large-scale computers.
You also have things like the IBM Cell processor from PS3 days: a PowerPC 'main' processor with 7 "Synergistic Processing Elements" that could be offloaded to. The SPEs were kinda like the current idea of 'big/small processors' a la ARM, except SPEs are way dumber and much harder to program.
Of course, specialized math, cryptographic and compression processors have been around forever. And you can even look at something like SCSI, where virtually all of the intelligence for working the drive was offloaded to the drive ccontroller.
Lots of ways the implement this idea.
This is what the Mac effectively does now - background tasks run on low-power cores, keeping the fast ones free for the interactive tasks. More specialised ARM processors have 3 or more tiers, and often have cores with different ISAs (32 and 64 bit ones). Current PC architectures are already very distributed - your GPU, NIC/DPU, and NVMe SSD all run their own OSs internally, and most of the time don’t expose any programmability to the main OS. You could, for instance, offload filesystem logic or compression to the NVMe controller, freeing the main CPU from having to run it. Same could be done for a NIC - it could manage remote filesystem mounts and only expose a high-level file interface to the OS.
The downside would be we’d have to think about binary compatibility between different platforms from different vendors. Anyway, it’d be really interesting to see what we could do.