Re: Paul Graham's PyCon Keynote

[Paul Graham <address@hidden>]

Graphics is one of the special applications I was careful
to exempt from such predictions.  I expect that it (along 
with e.g. cryptography and simulations) will continue to have
special-purpose hardware and languages to match.  --pg

--Steve Dekorte wrote:
> 
> Paul Graham wrote:
> > 2) "How far will this flattening of data structures go?
> 
> If you look at current trends, I think you'd predict the opposite to 
> happen. Consider 3d graphics cards. You could do the 3d operations on 
> the CPU but even with ever increasing CPU speeds, adding 10% to the 
> cost of your machine for >1000x the graphics performance is a great 
> deal. In fact, modern PCs have more far compute power in their graphics 
> cards than their CPUs.  I'd predict ever more specific hardware to the 
> algorithms/data structures commonly used. Or perhaps for all of them 
> with FPGAs.
> 
> I suspect Von Neumann architectures will be a historical curiosity in 
> 100 years as well as languages whose design mimics them.
> 
> Cheers,
> Steve
> Io, a small language: http://www.iolanguage.com/
>