>> I often tell my students that every cycle used by overhead >> (kernel, UI, etc) is a cycle taken away from doing the work >> of applications. I'd much rather have my DNA sequencing >> application finish in 25 days instead of 30 than to have >> the system look pretty during those 30 days. > > i didn't mean to imply we should not be frugal with cycles. > i ment to say that we simply don't have anything useful to > do with a vast majority of cycles, and that's just as wasteful > as doing bouncing icons. we need to work on that problem.
I gotcha. I guess it depends on what you're doing. I remember years ago running a simulation on the 11/750 we had. It simulated a DSP chip running 2 seconds of real time. It ran for over a week. (While it was running, I took the time to write another, faster simulator that was able to run the simulation in about 2 hours.) For something like that, we can certainly use all the cycles we can get. On the other hand, I might look for a faster way to compile a kernel a while back, but now it compiles fast enough on most any machine that I'm not too concerned about where to use the cycles. (I'm speaking of a Plan 9 or Inferno kernel here; not a *BSD or Linux kernel.) But I suspect that virtualization and Dis-style VMs are a pretty good use of cycles we have to spare. >> > that, plus the fact that the the mhz wars are dead and >> > gone. >> >> Does that mean we're all playing core wars now? :) > > yes it does. i've got $50 that says that in 2011 we'll be > saying that this one goes to eleven (cores). Excellent. I never expected to see core wars and Spinal Tap in the same discussion about Plan 9. BLS
