deviantbit

Not in those terms, but an autobiography is coming, and bits and pieces are being explained. I expect about 10 people to buy the book, as all of the socialists will want it for free. I am negotiating with a publisher as we speak on the terms.

"financial incentives"

This is the most ignorant response I've seen yet. We don't expect monetary gain from publishing a book. We expect our costs to be covered.

This is about the consumer, not the publisher. If we lived in a socialist system, they would still pirate our publications and we will still be in debt over it.

So, there are books out there. I use Computer Architecture: A Quantitative Approach by Hennessy and Patterson. Recent revisions have removed historical information. I understand why they did remove it. I wanted to use Stallings book, but the department had already made arrangements with the publisher.

The biggest problem on why we don't write books is that people don't buy them. They take the PDF and stick it on github. Publishers don't respond to the authors on take down requests, github doesn't care about authors, so why spend the time on publishing a book? We can chase grant money. I'm fortunate enough to not have to chase grant money.

Sure you did. What were they? The only successful transputer was the T414 and it never made it outside academia.

I tell students today that the best way to learn is by studying the mistakes others have already made. Dismissing the solutions they found isn’t being independent or smart; it’s arrogance that sets you up to repeat the same failures.

Sounds like you had a good mentor. Buy them lunch one day.

I see what you did there.

Obviously you missed the sarcasm.

Inmos was a disaster. No application ever shipped on one. EVER. It used a serial bus to resolve the problems that should have never been problems. Clearly you never wrote code for one. Each oslink couldn't reach more than 3 feet. What a disaster that entire architecture was.

"I believe there are two main things holding it back."

He really science’d the heck out of that one. I’m getting tired of seeing opinions dressed up as insight—especially when they’re this detached from how real systems actually work.

I worked on the Cell processor and I can tell you it was a nightmare. It demanded an unrealistic amount of micromanagement and gave developers rope to hang themselves with. There’s a reason it didn’t survive.

What amazes me more is the comment section—full of people waxing nostalgic for architectures they clearly never had to ship stable software on. They forget why we moved on. Modern systems are built with constraints like memory protection, isolation, and stability in mind. You can’t just “flatten address spaces” and ignore the consequences. That’s how you end up with security holes, random crashes, and broken multi-tasking. There's a whole generation of engineers that don't seem to realize why we architected things this way in the first place.

I will take how things are today over how things used to be in a heart beat. I really believe I need to spend 2-weeks requiring students write code on an Amiga, and the programs have to run at the same time. If anyone of them crashes, they all will fail my course. A new found appreciation may flourish.

Yep, transputers failed miserably. I wrote a ton a code for them. Everything had to be solved in a serial bus, which defeated the purpose of the transputer.

Let’s be honest, saying “just fix the page tables” is like telling someone they can fly if they “just rewrite gravity.”

Yes, on Apple Silicon, the hardware supports shared physical memory, and with enough “convincing”, you can rig up a contiguous virtual address space for both the CPU and GPU. Apple’s unified memory architecture makes that possible, but Apple’s APIs and memory managers don’t expose this easily or safely for a reason. You’re messing with MMU-level mappings on a tightly integrated system that treats memory as a first-class citizen of the security model.

I can tell you never programmed on an Amiga.

Please explain how these "worker cores" should operate.