alt Hacker NewsGiven enough power and space efficiency you would start putting multiple cpus together for specialized tasks. Distributed computing could have looked differently
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b112 • yesterday at 9:50 PM
This was the Amiga. Custom coprpcessors for sound, video, etc.
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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.