Re: Next Generation of Language

mark.hoemmen@xxxxxxxxx wrote:


I would argue that the HPC world has a lot to do with the game world (a
large number of mathematical floating-point computations; physics
calculations; some tolerance for inaccuracy in many cases) and the
embedded world (more strict resource restrictions and performance
requirements than usual).


Yes, I think that's definitely true - game programming *is* HPC
programming, albeit you tend to be targetting a platform whose end-user
cost is hundreds not millions of dollars.

I think that one important issue for general-purpose processors (or
general-purpose computer systems, be they multi core, multi socket,
multi board) is that they need to be able to support naive programs,
and support them without too catastrophic a performance hit. "Naive
programs" are probably something like "programs that assume a cc SMP
system" or something like that. That's not true for true HPC systems
or for special games hardware, be it graphics cards or consoles.
Though obviously even there you don't want to make the thing *too* hard
to program for.

--tim

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