Posted by my123 2 days ago
The only fujitsu laptops I used was back in 2011- it was a budget version for on-call and it was fine..
Sounds like the fans running 100% probably contributed significantly to the issue here. If I had to guess it was likely that the C-States were disabled in BIOS somehow so the CPU clock was running at full tilt the whole time, maybe combined with a bad thermal paste job.
I'm not here to defend Fujitsu but I've had really bad experiences with basically every major laptop brand (Dell: majorly bad coil whine and especially faulty soldered RAM, HP: keys vanishing from the keyboard and very weak hinges that break all the time, Apple: The GPU unsoldering itself and the butterfly keyboard shenanigans).
I don't really know any brand with a flawless track record sadly.
Before anyone brings up Thinkpads, they're trading on a reputation that hasn't been true for over a decade. If you have fond memories of a thinkpad it's most likely that you had it from before 2016, or it's "fine", but certainly not great.
Really miss the transflective display and wish that there were newer devices with such technology
I also liked their Primergy Servers, but never got one for a reasonable price to test it out.
Another thing was the Futro series (e.g. S930) that could be used as opnsense firewall or low budget proxmox host.
Unfortunately it was always hard to obtain the high quality stuff as a consumer and years ago they sold their mainboard section to kontron. So no new Fujitsu Mainboards for now... What a pity.
A Pentium 4 hit 3.8 GHz longer than that ago in 2004, so that's not special. And the estimated price will be $7,000-10,000, which isn't special either since that's about 10x more than it should be.
Hot take: GPUs disrupted the CPU industry to such a degree that CPUs never recovered, and like the k-shaped economy, the current status quo only serves a small fraction of customers. We can and should do better, but sadly we won't. Still, it's good that Fujitsu did this, for the competition if nothing else.
Managed languages runtimes are probably the ones that would be better equipped to take advantage of them, for distributed JIT, GC and asynchronous code.
The Connection Machine style with StarLisp.
Very few devs can write optimal multi-threaded code that explores the single digit count of cores on their laptops or phones already.
However one could argue that FPGAs are already that, and still we come back to a skill issue.
I am also not an expert, cannot make heads or tails about SIMD algorithms, and in what GPUs goes, only traditional shading languages.
Let alone algorithms that on top of that, should take optimal advantage of all available CPUs.
IMHO most concurrency problems don't actually need async behavior, they need higher-order methods and models which behave deterministically by encapsulating async behavior internally.
Another maturing solution is to use SAT solvers to prove that all exceptional behavior and failure modes are handled. I'm hopeful that AI will help with that and allow us to exercise programs fully, rather than rely on unit tests and fuzzing.
Personally I think that the UNIX model of orchestrating small async programs that do one thing well is the only proven mainstream solution. Erlang and Go come really close, but unfortunately we need a hybrid of the two, which doesn't currently exist. The pattern for that is functional core, imperative shell. Which mimics the real world where business logic can be formerly proven correct or constrained by types and categories, then we wire up programs cookie cutter style. That avoids the use of monads (promises/futures in imperative languages), which are the main footguns. The closest language that does that is ClojureScript, whose runtime is analogous to suspending and resuming a coroutine or green thread that makes Lisp calls (although that's a poor fit and I'm sure I'm wrong about it).
But you're right that we don't currently have a language that can recruit multicore CPUs. I used MATLAB/GNU Octave in the past, but think that Julia probably has a brighter future since it can already run on GPU mostly unmodified. I would not try to do it with a mainstream language like C# or Python, or even PHP for that matter. Although some of PHP's multiprocessing metaphors are pretty solid, since they intentionally use processes instead of threads like in Ruby. There the problem is latency introduced by poor process models used by Microsoft and Apple, not something fundamental with spawning processes. Real-time Linux attempts to unify the kernel under one process model to provide deterministic timing, which is hard enough for regular Linux and probably out of reach of the big OS companies, because money can't buy everything.
Very nice overview, also agree with the points that you presented.
Does Fujitsu have extensive expertise in processor development? I don't remember any notable Fujitsu processors.
Although, as irusensei notes, this seems to be an ARMv9 processor.