[rescue] SPARC memory query

[Carl R. Friend]

   Dave Fischer remarks:

> mcguire at neurotica.com writes:
> 
> >   The "balance" of a design is very, very important...this is something 
> >that the PeeCee industry can't quite seem to figure out.
> 
> I think the requirement for being part of the PC hardware industry
> is to have never heard of Amdahl, just like to be accepted into
> the PC software industry you must never have heard of Brooks.
> 
> Seriously though - they know, they just don't care. The way to
> make money moving lots and lots of little boxes is to make a 
> machine that is complient with a small handfull of buzzwords,
> and not spend a cent on anything else. 

   It's a game called "toss the bottleneck", and one that PC
manufacturers are getting rather good at.  Nobody wants the
bottleneck in their backyard (sort of like Dilbert's dead wood-
chuck) so they toss it to the next bloke.  The net result is
a poorly balanced system (or an entire neighbourhood that
stinks).  (The other analogy might be playing catch with a live
grenade where the "winner" gets the show-stopper.)

   Balance used to matter a whole lot, and people spent vast amounts
of time fine-tuning entire systems (not just subsystems).  But that
was also before computers were commodity items with dozens of times
the amount of horsepower that anybody actually needs (save gamers).
The answer today is throw more speed somewhere and get it to market.

   "Fine-tuning and tweaking be damned!  If we don't get this thing
out the door somebody else will beat us to market.  By the way, what's
that smell?"

   Cheers.

+------------------------------------------------+---------------------+
| Carl Richard Friend (UNIX Sysadmin)            | West Boylston       |
| Minicomputer Collector / Enthusiast            | Massachusetts, USA  |
| mailto:crfriend at rcn.com                        +---------------------+
| http://users.rcn.com/crfriend/museum           | ICBM: 42:22N 71:47W |
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