Welcome to the Jungle (article about the future of parallel computing)

[Nick Sabalausky]

"Paulo Pinto" <pjmlp at progtools.org> wrote in message 
news:je92bp$t68$1 at digitalmars.com...
>
> But he is in a way right.
>
> Even the small embedded systems are slowly becoming multicore. The most 
> recent ARM processors are now multicore.
>

Yes, because after all, who *doesn't* need to decode genomes on their 
telephone? ;)

> As an example of a multicore PIC, see the Parallax Propeller processor,
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parallax_Propeller.
>

Warning to all: The following two paragraphs may sound very strange 
considering they're coming from me...

The Propeller's awesome. Brilliant little chip. Not exactly a big fan of 
SPIN or the IDE, though (Personally, I would just as soon have spared the 
silicon used to embed that SPIN interpreter into the chip, or maybe 
repurposed it somehow). And the video output capabilities could be a little 
bit better. But those niggles aside, I admit, I'm a big fan of the 
Propeller. And the whole "multi-core microcontroller", believe it or not, is 
probably the main reason why. It's a cheap little thing and in terms of 
power, I'd estimate it to be...as if you had a device somewhere between an 
NES or SNES, but made the A/V circuitry almost entirely re-programmable.

I was actually lucky enough to have the opportunity to play with a Propeller 
on an early revision of the Hydra board ( www.xgamestation.com ) before 
either of their official releases. Still have the board right here on my 
desk, too:  https://www.semitwist.com/download/img/Hydra-v0.1.jpg  Although 
as you can see it's gathered...ummm...more than a little bit of dust since 
I've been drowning in the web world for so long now :/  (Actually, I'm kind 
of embarrassed by all the dust on it...I really should have covered it long 
ago...) I wrote the sound and eeprom drivers that come with the Hydra, and 
three of the demos: Hydra Rally, Deep Cavern 3D, and Piano Demo. (They're 
shown in a random rotation on the xgamestation homepage, reload the page a 
few times to see them all). It was a lot of exhausting work, but I had an 
absolute blast developing them. I love working with systems where you have 
full control and understanding over every single byte - especially when it's 
to the end of making games. Unfortunately I never really get the chance for 
such things anymore.


>
> Sure there will still be lots of scenarios where this won't be the case,
> like there are still 8 bit PIC processors being deployed in Assembly, but 
> they are niche products. The vast majority of the developers will have the 
> reality he describes.
>
> --
> Paulo