Keith wrote:
With all this being said, since you have the ability
to create custom
hardware that can perform exactly one function really really well, FPGAs
can often destroy multi-ghz PCs in terms of performance for limited
applications. You can create various hardware decoders(video, audio), or
encryption/decryption hardware. Provided you can scale this stuff
(parallelize), you can just keep throwing FPGAs at a problem. Small
FPGAs that are cheap are still fairly powerful.
You make it sound like, a PDP 8 with 4K of core has no useful
use at all. :)
Hope this helps the discussion.
Keith
Looking back with the emulators, of vintage hardware
it is the fact that expensive things like mass-storage
could be shared among several people. I have just been
installing some PDP 8 software on a IDE drive and even
with the small size of PDP 8 disks ( 2048k max ) you
sure can see how small programs and data was back then.
With a PDP 8 multi-tasking the programs I expect where
dog slow, but they could run with larger memory and
disks a larger machine could justify.