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by HeliumHydride
702 days ago
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https://scholar.harvard.edu/files/mickens/files/theslowwinte... "Unfortunately for John, the branches made a pact with Satan
and quantum mechanics [...] In exchange for their last remaining
bits of entropy, the branches cast evil spells on future genera-
tions of processors. Those evil spells had names like “scaling-
induced voltage leaks” and “increasing levels of waste heat”
[...] the branches,
those vanquished foes from long ago, would have the last laugh." "John was terrified by the collapse of the parallelism bubble,
and he quickly discarded his plans for a 743-core processor
that was dubbed The Hydra of Destiny and whose abstract
Platonic ideal was briefly the third-best chess player in Gary,
Indiana. Clutching a bottle of whiskey in one hand and a shot-
gun in the other, John scoured the research literature for ideas
that might save his dreams of infinite scaling. He discovered
several papers that described software-assisted hardware
recovery. The basic idea was simple: if hardware suffers more
transient failures as it gets smaller, why not allow software to
detect erroneous computations and re-execute them? This idea
seemed promising until John realized THAT IT WAS THE
WORST IDEA EVER. Modern software barely works when the
hardware is correct, so relying on software to correct hardware
errors is like asking Godzilla to prevent Mega-Godzilla from
terrorizing Japan. THIS DOES NOT LEAD TO RISING PROP-
ERTY VALUES IN TOKYO. It’s better to stop scaling your
transistors and avoid playing with monsters in the first place,
instead of devising an elaborate series of monster checks-
and-balances and then hoping that the monsters don’t do what
monsters are always going to do because if they didn’t do those
things, they’d be called dandelions or puppy hugs." |
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