I could follow most of this but man do you go low. My inferior high-level brain can't take much more ...
Haven't started. I just thought of bringing up an example of how such a PDE
for fully destructible environment are discretized resulting in a sparse
linear system of thousands of equations to be solved by a sparse linear
solver showing the issue of non-contiguous memory updates stemming from the
non-linear data structure inherent to such solvers, which do depending on
efficient DMA'ing to gain any high GFLOP rate. But I saved that one knowing
it would go off-topic way too much.
... Im still in the student stage(almost done though!!) but overall there is more of a focus on making managed languages like C# the standard where alot of work is done for you instead of teaching all of the solid fundamentals we should learn. The walls we are running into now is very much like you say, less and less concern is being placed on data in favor of a more uniform code based approach. I'm probably in no place to criticize but from the outside looking in I don't think developers had a good strong grasp of their code and where it could be broken down into a model that isn't the Wintel thread-centric norm. I think this is what stalled alot of advancement and choked performance.
Indeed.
In these times 9 out of 10 masters of computer science can't write a 'hello
world' in assembly. Aren't they suppose to know how the stuff works? It's
quite interesting how some of those people discuss the latest buzzes not
having a glue how it works underneath but claiming to know which system is
better. Go to a computer graphics course in most universities and you
will recognize that 9 out of 10 graduates can't raster a line on the screen.
But they are eager to build a new 3d engine and the latest of whatever
planet earth hasn't surfaced, yet. Let's finish this paragraph with a saying
of Mrs. Verda Spell of Beaumont from the '80s; "He who cannot in 64k program
cannot in 512k.".
... I have a question of my own, why are Sony dumping the Cell after spending so much time and money on it ?, wouldn't boosting the clocks of the CPU and adding in the 2 - 4GB's of Ram along with the 1.8 tFLOP GPU to it not make it just as powerful rather than starting again with an AMD CPU ? ...
In 2007 the Cell chip already run at 6GHz on 65nm CMOS SOI technology. If
you count that down to 32nm or 22nm would give a pretty efficient low heat/
wattage processor. So that's not the issue. If you trace the history in
creating the Cell processor then you may come to realize that there were many
issues at IBM. A new revision of the Cell processor seems to be impossible
since many of IBMs lead members of the STI Cell team have left the company
after dumping the chip into silicon. The issue was that the IBMer of the STI
team where forced under an additional pressure in creating the XBox360
processor as well. This has lead to many conflicts. The executive manager of
the STI Team, Dr. Akrout, a leading circuit designer working for IBM since
1982, who has lead the PowerPC team for the Apple Macintosh, Nintendo's
GameCube, etc. was a star at IBM and a visionary. However, he had enough of
the harsh rule of the IBMs directors and all the shifting politics of the
company leadership during that time. So he left. After Cell was shipped to
Sony, the PowerPC core lead, the SPE lead, and many others of the STI team
had left the company.
Btw; Did you know that Dr. Akrout went to AMD?
So the possible enhancements the Cell processors was designed for will
properly never going to be realized. And Sony is not being able to do it on
their own. It would be a complete restart to gather a team again in cranking
up the Cell processor. However, what could be done is stacking the Cell
processor, just like with the Xbox360 PowerPC processor. Four Cells could do
the job. However.
IBM might be not a reliable partner for Sony for the time being. Perhaps
Sony found a good partner with AMD for the next generation offering them
quite a lot of things. So Sony might have screwed the Cell chip altogether
in favor of the new offerings. I don't know, am just speculating. Personally,
I would like to see an enhanced Cell, well, four of them, within the PS4
combined with AMD for graphics.