The Fight Against Dark Silicon 137
An anonymous reader writes "What do you do when chips get too hot to take advantage of all of those transistors that Moore's Law provides? You turn them off, and end up with a lot of dark silicon — transistors that lie unused because of power limitations. As detailed in MIT Technology Review, Researchers at UC San Diego are fighting dark silicon with a new kind of processor for mobile phones that employs a hundred or so specialized cores. They achieve 11x improvement in energy efficiency by doing so."
Re:That's not the solution, this is (Score:5, Interesting)
Uuum, no need to learn some obscure weird language that doesn't even exist yet, when you can learn a (less) obscure weird language that already exists. ;)
Haskell already has provable thread-safe implicit parallelization. In more than one form even. You can just tell the compiler to make the resulting binary "-threaded". You can use thread sparks. And that's only the main implementations.
Plus it is a language of almost orgasmic elegance on the forefront of research that still is as fast as old hag grandma C and its ugly cellar mutant C++.
Requires the programmer to think on a higher level though. No pointer monkeys and memory management wheel reinventors. (Although you can still do both if you really want to.)
Yes, good sir, you can *officially* call me a fanboy. ;))
But at least I'm a fan of something that actually exists!
(Oh, and its IRC channel is the nicest one I've ever been to. :)