Off-Topic: The Machine

[Chris Angelico]

On Wed, Jun 25, 2014 at 5:31 PM, Gregory Ewing
<greg.ewing at canterbury.ac.nz> wrote:
> That's nice, but the question that comes to my mind is:
> What happens when a zillion cores are all competing for
> high-speed access to that memory?

And what happens if some of those cores are corrupt? Can you initiate
a core transfer? Will there be a stalemate? Are there any trained
Stalemate Resolution Associates around? What if there's a fire in the
Stalemate Resolution Annex?

Seriously, though, how would you go about debugging a system so
massively parallel? If most of the CPU cores are special-purpose, it's
going to require a whole new method of testing. I can just imagine
configure scripts having to be taught to cope with a new form of CPU
bug (in the same way that some still test for the Pentium division
bug).

ChrisA