Good talk on chip design issues to support lots of cores, particularly to support Java garbage collection. Azul has paid a lot of attention to avoiing cache misses, such a zeroing objects in the cache instead of with memory writes. It's interesting how cpu design has moved away from complex instruction pipelines to multitudes of simple cores.
Azul's market is enterprise Java (replacing Cobol) so massive support for threading makes sense. I dont think threads are a general cure for parallelism, such as with simulations, vision, AI, and the like. The brain for example has billions of processors and trillions of interconnects. Scheduling a few billion threads isnt going to cut it. Anyone have any thoughts on these issues?
Multiple concurrent threads of execution are fine as a concurrency substrate, so long as you minimize synchronization between threads. They can run on independent cores with no problem.
Threads are crap as a programming model.
Something like Clojure's parallel-friendly constructs has the potential to make an Azul box shine, whilst avoiding programmer error.
