[TUHS] PDP-11 legacy, C, and modern architectures

[Larry McVoy]

On Thu, Jun 28, 2018 at 05:41:24PM +0100, Tim Bradshaw wrote:
> On 28 Jun 2018, at 17:02, Larry McVoy <lm at mcvoy.com> wrote:
> > But when you are doing real work, sorting
> > the genome, machine learning, whatever, performance is a thing and
> > lots of wimpy cpus are not.
> 
> But lots of (relatively) wimpy CPUs is what physics says you will have
> and you really can't argue with physics.

I'm not sure how people keep missing the original point.  Which was:
the market won't choose a bunch of wimpy cpus when it can get faster
ones.  It wasn't about the physics (which I'm not arguing with), it 
was about a choice between lots of wimpy cpus and a smaller number of
fast cpus.  The market wants the latter, as Ted said, Sun bet heavily
on the former and is no more.

If you want to bet on what Sun did, feel free, but do so knowing that
people have tried to tell you that is a failed approach.