On Fri, Jul 11, 2008 at 7:06 AM, Xavier Leroy <Xavier.Leroy@inria.fr> wrote:
>  Look at GPUs, which are the closest we have
> today to a manycore system: 128 cores are available today, more is
> in preparation, but the programming model is definitely not SMP.

I was reading an article about CUDA written by an in-the-trenches
GPGPU programmer. I can't find it now, but one of the points of the
article, as I understood it, was that stream-oriented approaches (like
BrookGPU) look great in theory, but don't work very well in practice -
they can often be orders of magnitude slower than "dirty" approaches
that use some mutable shared memory block in the video card. In other
words, pure-functional programming for multi-core concurrency is just
a speculative promise (for academic funding purposes perhaps).

(If this sounds familiar and anyone has the link, please post)