Performance-oriented development in the commercial computing world

On Oct 26, 2011, at 1:26 AM, Dave McGuire wrote: I think it's a highly subjective term you'll find a lot of people arguing about. My gut-level definition is any computer that's designed not to seem like a computer, which covers any number of industrial control applications, consumer devices that aren't computers (like the army of talking baby toys that are out now), etc. I'd personally make the distinction between "embedded" and "mobile" when there's a screen attached. Of course, where I find the lines blurry are things like the application I mentioned, which was basically a bunch of processing blades. The board (an AMC board, if anyone is familiar) was just a 2"x6" (roughly) board with a big-ass FPGA, a TI DSP (why they insisted on that is anyone's guess) and the PowerPC for housekeeping. It was primarily designated for processing satellite data, with the FPGA doing the heavy DSP lifting and the DSP doing the cellular signal processing. So what do we call that? Maybe it's not embedded, but it's certainly highly specialized hardware and software for a particular task (you could use that board for any number of heavy compute tasks, but it would make a terrible PC or generic server). Just musing, anyway. I feel like going down this taxonomy rabbit hole is as much of a fool's errand as the "speed metal"/"thrash metal"/etc. arguments we'd have in high school. - Dave