Re: New ISA board to play with transputers

john larkin <jl@glen--canyon.com> wrote:

 
Seems a shame to have an x86 core wasting time handling ethernet and
printers and mice and memory sticks when they could be doing better
things like running Spice.

Many of those things are already happening outboard anyway - all those
things have processors in them.  What the CPU is doing is largely managing
the data transfer to and from the device.  eg the printer speaks PCL or
Postscript and the OS's workload is limited to firing the job at the printer
(USB/network) and the printer's CPU then decides where to put the ink on
the page.

You can delegate that management oversight to another core if you like, but
then you need management oversight of *that* core.

My Windows 11 thing is running hundreds of processes right now. That's
crazy.

Windows problems :-)  But many of those things don't need to take much CPU -
they're ready to handle print jobs when you press Ctrl-P, but the rest of
the time they're ticking along in the background not taking much resources
because they don't need them.

The OS is running thousands of kernel threads, but they're mostly blocked
(not scheduled) until they need to do something.  One thread per 'thing',
more or less.  All that thread needs is a few hundred bytes for its register
state so the impact is small.

Computing is a mess. A new hardware architecture would at least
suggest a fresh start.

Non-Windows, non-x86 architectures are available...

Theo