Comment on Analog computing is undergoing a resurgence

• ekky43@lemmy.dbzer0.com ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

  A CPU is a very complex gate array which handles bothersome tasks such as synchronization (run conditions) and memory access, and presents you with a very limited set of instructions. All serial programming builds upon this very limited set of instructions, and the instructions have been thoroughly tested over the past 6 decades.

  Not to say that CPU architecture or microcode is fail-safe, but the chance of your computer blue-screening because of a failure of your CPU is rather small.

  Now, parallel programming (the low level variant, not the hijacked definition) is the art of “wiring” those gate arrays manually. A CPU is actually made using parallel programming, so all the safeties it presents for serial programming will not be present in parallel programming, as parallel programming does not use a CPU.

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  • elbarto777@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

    You lost me at parallel programming not using a CPU.

    Perhaps you mean that it uses the lower levels of the CPU.

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    • ekky43@lemmy.dbzer0.com ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

      I think you are misunderstanding me. Are you perhaps thinking about multithreading or multi core? Because some people have also started calling that “parallel”, even if it is nothing like low-level parallel.

      A CPU does not build upon a CPU, a CPU builds upon a transistors which are collected into gates, and which can be assembled into the correct order using parallel programming.

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      • elbarto777@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

        I understand all that. I wrote my first 6502 assembler program in 1989 - and it was fun, by the way!

        I am also aware that today’s CPUs are nothing like the 8-bit CPUs of the 80s. So we’re on the same page in that respect.

        I understand what you’re saying now. You’re talking about programmable gate arrays, which is cool. But I still don’t understand how “parallel programming” gate arrays comes with almost no safety compared to “serial programming” gate arrays. If you are not careful in either mode, you can introduce serious bugs in the programming.

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