@i @dcc @p

> and your reasons/thoughts are valid, and not just a leftover habit,

Ah, okay, yeah. I think there's a lot of, like, leftover habit that is not worth considering.

> flamewar i've had to endure at workTM,

This is a fuckin' thing. You don't get fired from fedi for saying dumb shit about computers, but for some reason, people on fedi seem to know what they're doing way more often than people at work.

> plan9 just seemed funnier than boomer when choosing an 'ism

:autismapproved:

> probably false since the box is mostly sleeping on IO,

It's plausible. The machine is waiting on I/O on a typical workload but on a CPU-heavy workload, it's going to be memory. It is more or less why smart register allocation overtook stacks. The problem is that most programs don't fit in icache. Speaking of Plan 9 autism, there was a research fork for multi-core systems, I forget the name, but they basically relegated the OS to a single CPU and then locked threads to cores and relied on, except for some tasks (recollection hazy) I think they forced cooperative multitasking. Their results were encouraging but under a regular Unix-style workload where you have a large number of short-lived processes, not ground-shattering. (Maybe the problem was just that they had 8-way machines instead of Threadrippers and it's worth revisiting.)

> but does lower the ceiling of power use possible,

This is old but is very good: http://yosefk.com/blog/the-bright-side-of-dark-silicon.html . I have never regretted time spent reading anything YosefK wrote. I think if you mash that piece together with his piece on FPGAs, and then you toss in Chuck Moore's GreenArrays designs (effectively, the FPGA part of the FPGA loses in terms of power density and performance to arrays of extremely tiny, like a tiny stack and enough memory for 256 instructions, pre-packing), you can kind of see the path from here to compute-dust. (Maybe "dust" is an exaggeration, but "pebbles" look like they can be achieved today.)

I have a lot of things to say on this and the network being the computer and how much of the brain's computation is dendrites and axons and chemical side-channeling rather than neurons doing S-curves like the ANN/RNN people are still fixated on, but we will be here for hours once I get on this topic and I think you can probably see where I'm going with that.

> side effect of limiting the amount of work it could do at 100% load

Yeah, I'd probably do it differently if I wanted to set the record for biggest Mersenne prime, but then there'd be no reason to put it into a datacenter near the backbone. I think I'd shove a GPU in there if I were doing Peertube. (graf has been experimenting with the GPU-accelerated Postgres patches, I should ask him how that went.) For what the box is doing, I basically took my observations from sitting on shit-tier Frantech boxes and tuned appropriately.