8 Mar
2023
8 Mar
'23
7:52 p.m.
[bumping to COFF]
On Wed, Mar 8, 2023 at 2:05 PM ron minnich <rminnich(a)gmail.com> wrote:
The wheel of reincarnation discussion got me to
thinking:
What I'm seeing is reversing the rotation of the wheel of reincarnation. Instead of
pulling the task (e.g. graphics) from a special purpose device back into the general
purpose domain, the general purpose computing domain is pushed into the special purpose
device.
I first saw this almost 10 years ago with a WLAN modem chip that ran linux on its 4 core
cpu, all of it in a tiny package. It was faster, better, and cheaper than its traditional
embedded predecessor -- because the software stack was less dedicated and
single-company-created. Take Linux, add some stuff, voila! WLAN modem.
Now I'm seeing it in peripheral devices that have, not one, but several independent
SoCs, all running Linux, on one card. There's even been a recent remote code exploit
on, ... an LCD panel.
Any of these little devices, with the better part of a 1G flash and a large part of 1G
DRAM, dwarfs anything Unix ever ran on. And there are more and more of them, all over the
little PCB in a laptop.
The evolution of platforms like laptops to becoming full distributed systems continues.
The wheel of reincarnation spins counter clockwise -- or sideways?
About a year ago, I ran across an email written a decade or more prior
on some mainframe mailing list where someone wrote something like,
"wow! It just occurred to me that my Athlon machine is faster than the
ES/3090-600J I used in 1989!" Some guy responded angrily, rising to
the wounded honor of IBM, raving about how preposterous this was
because the mainframe could handle a thousand users logged in at one
time and there's no way this Linux box could ever do that.
I was struck by the absurdity of that; it's such a ridiculous
non-comparison. The mainframe had layers of terminal concentrators,
3270 controllers, IO controllers, etc, etc, and a software ecosystem
that made heavy use of all of that, all to keep user interaction _off_
of the actual CPU (I guess freeing that up to run COBOL programs in
batch mode...); it's not as though every time a mainframe user typed
something into a form on their terminal it interrupted the primary
CPU.
Of course, the first guy was right: the AMD machine probably _was_
more capable than a 3090 in terms of CPU performance, RAM and storage
capacity, and raw bandwidth between the CPU and IO subsystems. But the
3090 was really more like a distributed system than the Athlon box
was, with all sorts of offload capabilities. For that matter, a
thousand users probably _could_ telnet into the Athlon system. With
telnet in line mode, it'd probably even be decently responsive.
So often it seems to me like end-user systems are just continuing to
adopt "large system" techniques. Nothing new under the sun.
I'm no longer sure the whole idea of the wheel or
reincarnation is even applicable.
I often feel like the wheel has fallen onto its side, and we're
continually picking it up from the edge and flipping it over, ad
nauseum.
- Dan C.