If I Had a Billion, Part 5

[jeff_duntemann]

(Continuing a thread I began in my July 13, 2007 entry.) A gratifying number of people who wrote to me indicated that they would fund research, in a lot of different areas. I'm for that; research is much less political than education, and much more can be done with less money. (Even a billion

Comments

[regek]

Actually, come to think of it, this reminds me of the problems people are having coding for the PS3. The Cell chip can deliver absurd performance. We're talking gigaflops upon gigaflops. The problem is that it's massively parallel and nobody knows how to code for that. Computer games are just now starting to become multithreaded, and that's only to take advantage of dual-core processors. Before Intel really started pushing the Core Duo, the closest we got to parallelism in games and most other apps were shaders that ran on the video card.

For that matter, lots of games still use integer math internally for everything, which skips right by the purpose of these big, expensive (in terms of silicon area) vector coprocessing units everyone has been adding to their chips. Apple's page on optimizing the Noble Ape simulator focuses on one specific debugging tool from Apple, but it's a good example of the kind of performance increase some applications can see from multithreading and using vector math.

I just wish more coders would use tools like that to spot places where their applications need improvement. :-p