Ian F. writes:
Secret: take lots and lots and lots of money, use the most exotic packaging technologies you can find, pay lots and lots of attention to your memory system and cache, don't forget the importance of a nicely balanced architecture (meaning that I/O does matter), don't forget the importance of good compilers, and implement bit counting instructions just like the NSA tells you to.
Hardly a secret, don't you think?
With no disrepect meant to Ian (indeed, this is my second reply of the day to him), I think his point is dead wrong. The "secret" to general success in this market is not "lots and lots of money," at least not when "lots and lots" is the tens of millions of dollars that Cray Computer will apparently being getting from NSA and the Supercomputer folks in Bowie for the delivery of an ostensible Cray 4 or whatever it ends up being called (SMPP, etc.). $10 million is pocket change. Anyone building a company on that chump change is already preparing Chapter 11 papers. Here's what "lots and lots of money" *really* is: - $1 billion to complete a wafer fab in Ireland, finished last February - $1.3 billion to build a wafer fab in Albuquerque, to be finished later this year (said to be the most expensive privately funded building in the world) - $1.3 billion to build essentially a duplicate of the above facilities, in Chandler, Arizona...construction to start this year - $2 billion to build yet another wafer fab, in Hillsboro, Oregon..construction to start in 1995 Intel is already the world's largest chip comany (in _all_ chips, not just one particular type). If this series of expansions works out (and the Ireland plant is churning out Pentiums on 200 mm wafers with very high yields), then Intel will be nearly twice the size of its nearest competitor. Intel Corporation, my employer from 1974 to 1986, may not have the most elegant architecture in the world, but its microprocessor fabrication facilities are clearly the best in the world. The economies of scale are amazing to comtemplate. (And I was near the group in Oregon that tried "elegance"...the iAPX 432 object-oriented processor. I only hope the new Intel-H-P alliance on VLIW is not similarly stillborn.) (And a new generation of hackers are using Linux on cheap Pentium boxes to easily outrun Suns.) Is a massively parallel system of Pentiums or 200 SPECInt P6s or 400 SPECInt P7s the "best" way to go? Given the economies of scale, the familiarity many people just like you will have with the Pentium, it probably is. I'm a fan of the Mac, and may soon be buying a PowerMac, but the PowerPC does not seem to have the same economies of scale. At least, Motorola is not expanding rapidly enough to keep up. (A hot rumor, to take with some skepticism: a friend of mine told me tonight that the rumor going around MIPS is that Motorola plans nothing beyond the 603, that they are fed up with the politics of the Somerset group (IBM, Motorola, Apple), and that they just don't have $5 billion laying around to remain competitive with Intel. The rumor is that they plan to concentrate on telecom, cellular, Iridium, etc., and not fight Intel head-on with a come-from-behind architecture.) So you see why I consider the "lots and lots of money" flowing into Cray Computer to be spitting into the ocean. I'm not worried. --Tim May -- .......................................................................... Timothy C. May | Crypto Anarchy: encryption, digital money, tcmay@netcom.com | anonymous networks, digital pseudonyms, zero 408-688-5409 | knowledge, reputations, information markets, W.A.S.T.E.: Aptos, CA | black markets, collapse of governments. Higher Power: 2^859433 | Public Key: PGP and MailSafe available. "National borders are just speed bumps on the information superhighway."