Slashdot article about multicore

[Robert Jacques]

On Sun, 22 Mar 2009 22:09:53 -0400, Robert Jacques <sandford at jhu.edu>  
wrote:

> On Sun, 22 Mar 2009 21:55:04 -0400, Brian <digitalmars at brianguertin.com>  
> wrote:
>
>> "Windows and Linux Not Well Prepared For Multicore Chips"
>> http://developers.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=09/03/22/193205&from=rss
>>
>> I wouldn't completely agree that operating systems aren't ready for such
>> things.
>>
>> One of the comments reads: "This is the kind of the the compiler could  
>> do
>> just fine ... by isolating parts of the code in which there are no
>> dependencies in the data-flow, and which could therefore run in
>> parallel..."
>>
>> This sounds like what "pure" functions are going to be for, right?
>
> Yes and No. No, what they are talking about is a parallelizing compiler.  
> i.e. one that performs automatic parallelization / code analysis, which  
> for the most part doesn't work because it has no grantees. And yes, pure  
> is all about giving the complier the grantees it needs to actually  
> automatically parallelize the code.

Okay, next time I should read TFA before posting. What the author is  
talking about isn't pure or parallelizing compilers. What he's actually  
talking about is adding parallel instructions to the CPU. (The focus was  
on Itanium (which exchanged out-of-order execution for compiler controlled  
parallel instructions), though it could easily apply to the next SSE  
instruction set (specifically the one coming with larrabee) which  
primarily adds conditional tests and an execution mask. These allow for  
SIMD flow control (and have been in GPUs for a while) )