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

[Paul Sladen]

On Wed, 13 Jun 2001, Joshua D. Boyd wrote:
> 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.

I think somebody from Sony tried to do this with the PlayStation/2;  it's
just a pity that they gave the Graphics/Vector unit a measly 4meg RAM, which
means that everything has to go over the System bus from main memory if you
want to do anything spectacular.

`Spectacular' in this case simply means Full-screen, textured polys
everywhere; Someone who did the math of this reckoned on 8-12meg for the
geometery, and textures used per second, and 8-12meg doesn't fit in 4meg
anyway you try.

Yet again, lack of cache, lack of I/O bandwidth; damn.

Paul