Right-wing computers

Saw this post and started musing on computing machines …

Firstly, lambda machines are not yet built.

But we have Turing machines, so we had to worry about designing a fast ISA and efficient way to move data between memory and processor.

RISC - did show us how to pack a processor efficiently and make it fast via pipe-lining, branch prediction et al..

Btw, processor got faster while memory lagged behind.

Cache, built with costly high speed SRAM, was added that would bridge the gap between processor and memory.

That brings us to how the fastest machines are built,

• A trace architecture that will pack a fast processing.
• A cache architecture that will bridge memory with processor.

So, how fast a language can be ? Only as fast as the compiler understand the machine, and that understanding happens over a long time, after hundreds of man-years spent.

After which, a simple change to the processor (say like reducing the cache, or moving to NUMA) can adversely negate all that effort spent. The effort spent becomes effort lost.

So, the machine does not dare to change ! Welcome to the right wing of machine computing.

And Lastly, lambda machines are yet to be built.