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by titzer 541 days ago
It's not just I/O, it's data pipelining. Threads can be used to do a lot of different kinds of compute in parallel. For example, one could pipeline a multi-step computation, like a compiler: make one thread for parsing, one for typechecking, one for optimizing, and one for codegening, and then have function move as work packages between threads. Or, one could have many threads doing each stage in serial for different functions in parallel. Threads give programmers the flexibility to do a wide variety of parallel processing (and sometimes even get it right).

IMHO the jury is still out on whether async I/O is worth it, either in terms of performance or the potential complexity that applications might incur in trying to do it via callback hell. Many programmers find synchronous I/O to be a really, really intuitive programming model, and the lowest levels of the software stack (i.e. syscalls) are almost always synchronous.
2 comments
vacuity 541 days ago
The ability to directly program for asynchronous phenomena is definitely worth it[0]. Something like scheduler activations, which imbues this into the threading interface, is just better than either construct without the other. The main downside is complexity; I think we will continuously improve on this but it will always be more complex than the inevitably-less-nimble synchronous version. Still, we got io_uring for a reason.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42221316

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dragontamer 541 days ago
Fair. It's not like GPUs are entirely SIMD (and as I said in a sibling post, I agree that GPUs have substantial traditional threads involved).

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But let's zoom into Raytracing for a minute. Intel's Raytrace (and indeed, the DirectX model of Raytracing) is for Ray Dispatches to be consolidated in rather intricate ways.

Intel will literally move the stack between SIMD lanes, consolidating rays into shared misses and shared hits (to minimize branch divergence).

There's some new techniques being presented here in today's SIMD models that cannot easily be described by the traditional threading models.

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