Monday, July 16, 2007

parallel futures?

Great blog on What would you do with 80 cores? by Sean Koehl, an Intel researcher. This is one of my longer-lasting hobby-horses - I find the argument that we will eventually run out of steam on single processor architectures quite persuasive, and I would love to have a go at programming the 80-core teraflops research chip (is it as similar to the transputer in spirit as it appears to be?).

My hunch is that when and if explicitly parallel processing has taken off, the wave of change that this generates will open a window for optical computing, which has enormous potential for analogue and digital parallel processing.

In the mean time I'm learning Erlang as a background recreation - it's always good to give the grey-cells a work-out.

Tuesday, July 10, 2007

Republican virtues

I may not believe in God, but I can understand and respect the urge, in those who do, to seek his forgiveness for a serious sin. A touch of humility from those in power is always refreshing to the rest of us.

But passing on the news that you have in fact received not only your wife's but also God's forgiveness seems to me to reflect a slightly different virtue.

Sunday, July 01, 2007

A stopped clock is right twice a day

I know a stopped clock is be right twice a day, and even my clothes may start looking fashionable about once a decade, but I've pretty well given up hope on my economic forecasting being proved right.

But if I'm going to get it wrong, I might as well get it wrong on the record and go down with all flags flying.

Evan Davis is worried about first quarter figures for UK real household incomes and savings.

And the boys have told us that they are planning to go back to Poland (once they've finished painting our new place, we trust) because Poland has is co-hosting the Euro 2012 football championship and no longer has enough workers to build the stadiums.

I think the property boom will be seriously over within six months. I've thought this for at least three years, and the market has made a liar of me for at least two and a half years, but let's make a prediction and see.