[TUHS] ATC/OSDI'21 joint keynote: It's Time for Operating Systems to Rediscover Hardware (Timothy Roscoe)

[Bakul Shah]

On Sep 17, 2021, at 11:56 AM, Jon Steinhart <jon at fourwinds.com> wrote:
> 
> Bakul Shah writes:
>> 
>> IMHO the real issue is that the software folks are *not* providing
>> and *can no*t provide any sort of guidance for general purpose
>> computing, as the memory underlying modern programming languages
>> is so far removed from reality. The situation is sorta like what
>> happens with people with newly acquired incredible wealth but no
>> background in how to spend or manage it wisely (and I don't mean
>> *investing* to get more wealth). At least in that case there are
>> people who can help you and a tremendous need. Here we can put
>> billions and billions of gates on a chip and even do wafer scale
>> integration but these gates are not fungible like money.
> 
> Are you sure about this?  Or is it just that the hardware folks got to
> work without ever asking software/systems people for input?

Let me ask you.

You have a budget of 24 Billion transistors (& a much more limited
power budget). How would you spend it to maximize general purpose
computing?

Note that Esperanto Tech. was founded by Dave Ditzel, not exactly a
h/w newbie. [EE/CS, worked with Dave Patterson, CTO @ Sun, Transmeta
founder etc. etc.]. Now it is entirely possible that Esperanto folks
are building such processors for special purpose applications like
Machine learning but the fact is we simply have an incredible riches
of transistors that we don't how to spend wisely, [My opinion, of course]