19 Oct
1998
19 Oct
'98
11:03 a.m.
I wrote:
< can not compete with a high-end monolithic
microprocessor. The laws of
< physics conspire against it.
Allison J Parent replied:
They do. There are ways around that. Tricks like
massively parallel or
very wide words to name a few.
And none of those tricks scale up very well for implementing high-performance
versions of standard microprocessor architectures. The point was that
it is impossible to build a discrete-transistor x86 to outperform (or even
match the performance of) the Pentium II. You could build some sort of
non-x86 discrete transistor to outperform the PII on specialized tasks, but
that's a different matter entirely.
Eric