Re: The Petaflops Boondoggle Computer (was PET_ard)

["Timothy C. May" <tcmay@got.net>]

At 11:50 AM -0800 9/29/96, jim bell wrote:
>At 10:00 AM 9/29/96 -0800, Timothy C. May wrote:
>>(Hoist by their own petards indeed! Don't tell our Russian what petard
>>means.)
>
>Uh, wasn't that the name of the bald captain on Star Trek Next Generation?
>You know, "Jean-Luc Petard"?

Picard. To keep people out of suspense, "hoist by one's own petard" has one
etymology involving a lift-off by gaseous action (though the more
family-oriented dictionaries cite a petard as a French rocket of some sort,
ignoring the point that the name comes from this same gaseus emission).

>Check out an article in about the September issue of Scientific American,
>1966, on the subject of the Illiac IV, which was one of the first attempts
>at a multiprocessor machine.  Originally it was conceived as a 256-processor
>unit, at 4 million (floating point?) operations per second per processor
>which would have been 1 giga ops per second, but it was eventually built as
>a 64-processor unit and turned on in about 1972 or so.  The succeeding
>factor-of-1000 improvement appears (if the item above is accurate) to have
>taken  24 years to accomplish, so it's hard to imagine that the next factor
>of 1000 will arrive appreciably sooner than year 2020.

I agree. By the way, I knew some of the folks who worked on parts of the
Illiac-IV, which was still limping along as late as the late 70s (maybe
later). It suffered, as expected, from lack of robust software. Not a huge
incentive to write decent software when there's only a single machine!

(The Livermore S1 project was yet another such example. So was the CDC
Star, of approximately the same vintage as the Illiac.)


>Oddly enough, however, we're getting somewhat of an echo of the "big single
>processor" phenomenon with the micros.  We all know that in supercomputers,
>multiprocessors won out over single processors, and mainframes were just
>about defeated by microcomputers.
>
>Yet a look at Intel's pricing for Pentiums shows that they sell a 120-MHz
>chip for about $135, while they sell a 200-megahertz version for around $550
>or so.   Arithmetic suggests that a person would be far better off with a
>4-120-MHz-processor Pentium (cumulative clock rate 480 MHz) than a single,
>200-megahertz version.  (admittedly, peripheral logic costs will adjust this
>a little.)   Of course, this would also leave Intel flat on its ass
>attempting to compete with AMD, Cyrix, etc, because a somewhat higher speed
>per cpu is just about the only advantage they have.

Intel is having no problem at all competing with AMD and Cyrix! Both of
them are struggling---AMD just announced a layoff, and Cyrix is facing
financial troubles. Neither are able to make competitive parts, for reasons
I won't go into here, and neither are making the money they'll need to
compete in the future with Intel. (Intel has half a dozen billion-dollar
wafer fabs, running with extraordinarily high yields--so my sources tell me
:-})--and the more money they make, the more factories they build, the more
they learn about how to make 0.35 and 0.25 micron chips, etc.)

As to pricing, that's mostly a market issue. They charge what the market
will bear. As to why a 200 MHz chip sells for 3-4x what a 120 MHz chip
sells for, this is a matter of supply-and-demand and _system_ costs. When
someone is already spending, say, $2000 on a system, they'll usually pay an
extra $500 for a faster version. (Approximately. Again, the market is the
ultimate arbiter.)

Symmetric multiprocessing is available, but it's often much less hassle to
have a single CPU running at 200 MHz than to try games with multiple
processors (which means more PCB real estate, more sockets, more of other
things).

--Tim May

We got computers, we're tapping phone lines, I know that that ain't allowed.
---------:---------:---------:---------:---------:---------:---------:----
Timothy C. May              | Crypto Anarchy: encryption, digital money,
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