• Buddahriffic@lemmy.world
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    2
    ·
    1 hour ago

    Were you generating dynamic instructions based on what the cores were doing or was it all statically programmed such that the PowerPC core had to be running very specific code that went along with the specific code running on each worker core?

    That first one might have been very scalable, though I have a feeling either one would be a nightmare to actually write and hell to debug.

    • 🇨🇦 tunetardis@piefed.ca
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      2
      ·
      30 minutes ago

      Oh I never got that far. It was all static. I supposed if I had kept plugging away it, I might’ve reinvented a 64-bit OpenCL eventually, but you have to understand the uphill climb it all was. Like I was shocked to discover at one point that while you could compile a 64-bit executable, the malloc library function was still only 32-bit! I bitched about this to IBM tech support, and they said well you could write your own malloc using mmap. I mean yikes!