3 Nov
2005
3 Nov
'05
5:57 p.m.
der Mouse wrote:
Now, now. If you ask a hundred different TLAs what they most need
added to the ISA to best help them infringe people's liberties
you'll get one hundred different answers :-)
I think the original context (from memory, I cannot find the
talk on the web right now) was folks asking for "favourite
instruction" to be added in P4. The answer was along the lines
of "OK, but the increased complexity will affect the projected
yield by %X which will increase costs by $GIGABUX so you need
to guarantee to purchase $GIGABUX worth of processors for the
first N years". Folks then learn to make do.
Seriously, if you need pop(N) or whatever, you can implement it
today and in a year (or two) from now you'll be running as fast
as you thought you would have been with pop(N). I suppose now that
clock speed acceleration is declining, that may no longer be true,
but multiple cores should offset that (once we figure out how
to use them).
Or maybe all these TLAs are now leaning on the GPU manufacturers
and that's why we are beginning to see these APIs for ATI and
NVIDIA cards so that they can help out with those physics
simulations ...
Antonio
--
Antonio carlini
arcarlini at iee.org
According to a
talk I saw on the web a few years ago now, by one of
the guys in charge of P3 (or P4), people still ask "can I have
such-and-such" an instruction!
The nerve of them! Expecting what people want to actually matter to
the processor designers!