[rescue] Re: [geeks] THIS. MAKES. ME. SICK.

[Joshua D. Boyd]

On Wed, 13 Jun 2001 dave at cca.org wrote:

> jdboyd at cs.millersville.edu writes:
> >We just need a few people with some money to design a chip that works
> >decently with only a 33mhz frontside bus, yet manages to perform at least
> >as fast a P2, and would be safe to put in SMP.  I wonder how hard it is to
> >design CPUs...
> 
> That wouldn't gain you anything. The performance difference between
> a workstation and a super these days is almost entirely due to the
> memory bandwidth & IO.

If you are talking about about a normal super computer, like the SP/2, or
T3E, then absolutely.

However, a vector processor with something like, say 8megs of l2 cache,
could still be pretty fast.

Now, I wasn't even nescesarily thinking that it needed to be a "super
computer".  I just thought it would be a cool way to built a multimedia
machine.

And I picked 33mhz bus (could be 100mhz internally) because everything
I've heard suggests that designing boards becomes much harder after 33mhz.

--
Joshua Boyd