Re: FPGAs and Heat (Re: Paranoid Musings)

[mpd@netcom.com (Mike Duvos)]

Timothy C. May writes:

> This was a company in Bowie, Maryland, closely linked with the NSA and with
> the "supercomputer centers." The idea of "processing in memory" has been
> explored by various companies.

That's one of the things that killed Thinking Machines.  It turned out
that a standard supercomputer with PIM chips for memory could give the
same performance for less money.  The PIMs did the massively parallel
computation with the standard architecture redistributing data as needed
using high bandwidth scatter-gather operations and moves.

At the time Thinking Machines went under, Seymour Cray had a big contract
for Cray Computer to deliver a PIM Cray machine to the government, but he
missed some deadlines, got cancelled, and his company went down the tubes
as well.  Too bad, it would have been a nice box. 

BTW, I gave up trying to predict innovations after being dragged down to 
see an early version of Visi-Calc running on an Apple, and horribly 
insulting the developers with comments like "But why would anyone want 
to emulate a ledger sheet?" and "I hope you guys didn't spend a lot of
time on this."  After repeating such performances at startups like Lotus
and Infocom, I realized that predictive history was not one of my talents.

--
     Mike Duvos         $    PGP 2.6 Public Key available     $
     mpd@netcom.com     $    via Finger.                      $