River Trail — Intel's Parallel JavaScript 134
mikejuk writes "Intel has just announced River Trail, an extension of JavaScript that brings parallel programming into the browser. The code looks like JavaScript and it works with HTML5, including Canvas and WebGL, so 2D and 3D graphics are easy. A demo video shows an in-browser simulation going from 3 to 45 fps and using all eight cores of the processor. This is the sort of performance needed if 3D in-browser games are going to be practical. You can download River Trail as a Firefox add-on and start coding now. Who needs native code?"
Re:Fuck parallel programming. (Score:5, Interesting)
Not entirely. One of the features of Sun's cancelled Rock CPU was something they called Thread Scout. The idea was to run one core ahead of another, skipping most computation, to pre-fault memory addresses.
That was done back in the days with the original 68000. They were put in tandem in some machines, and one processor ran slightly ahead of the other. If it hit a bus fault, the second 68000 was used to recover, as the original 68K could not recover normally from a bus fault. Obviously this was not for performance purposes, but rather for reliability, but it's amazingly similar.
The oh-ten could recover from bus faults, and the 020 had a full-scale (although external) MMU option, so the technique ceased to be used.