alt Hacker NewsFrom the URL:
"Instead of starting from a sequential design, we’re building our processor to have thousands of cores operating in parallel. This requires moving beyond the notion of shared mutable memory and linear instruction sequences. To make this possible, we’re working in tandem on the open-source language Vine, which has been designed from the beginning to target a new wave of parallel-first architectures."
I wish them well but from their Vine language docs:
"For example, a < b < c is equivalent to (a < b) & (b < c)"
So how do you parallelize that? You can run the first part on 2 cores in parallel, but there is still a single check, a single cache, a single CPU for this to go through to complete the operation, right?
Replies
I think thats a poor example (either that, or less charitably, they're scamming investors).
They just described a common superscalar optimization thats been done since the 90s.
It took me a second to find you were referencing section 2.8 https://vine.dev/docs/features/conditions
With that context, this example is a minimal example for explaining `and` short circuits and `&` does not. I.e. the `a < b < c is equivalent to (a < b) & (b < c)` is just explaining the logical behavior (with even more verbose equivilant logic after), not showing off how this particular example will parallelize better as part of introing the conditional operators behavior.
This exists to allow you to control whether parallel computation should happen or if it should resolve the first condition before wasting parallel compute to resolve the nth condition(s). E.g. imagine something like `isEven(x) & len(factor(x) > 2` vs `isEven(x) and len(factor(x) > 2` (but the functions can be a lot more complicated). Maybe you want to tell the compiler to short circuit and save average compute at the cost of total latency, maybe you want to tell the compiler to schedule both in parallel and get the better max latency at the cost of running more compute. Especially if you do vast numbers of such things as a workload vs just a few as a dependency.
I haven't read through the rest of everything to see if they have anything interesting compared to other parallel computation solutions, I just know this example isn't supposed to help answer that one way or the other.