Hardware acceleration for compilation?
Go to solution
Solved by BobVonBob,
It turns out a hardware accelerator for compiling would look almost exactly like a CPU. It would need to perform large, varied, sequential tasks as fast as possible, and that happens to be what CPUs are already good at.
The way we write programs makes them unfriendly to parallelism. Consider the following:
int a = 5; int b = a + 2; int c = a + b;
Each line changes the state of the program, and the following lines depend on that change, so how would you break this up to compile in parallel?
GPUs are great at performing tons of small, highly repetitive, independent computations, and it turns out a lot of what we do on computers can be split up into small, highly repetitive, independent computations, but compiling is not one of those things.
Create an account or sign in to comment
You need to be a member in order to leave a comment
Create an account
Sign up for a new account in our community. It's easy!
Register a new accountSign in
Already have an account? Sign in here.
Sign In Now