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, tcmay@got.net 408-728-0152 | anonymous networks, digital pseudonyms, zero W.A.S.T.E.: Corralitos, CA | knowledge, reputations, information markets, Higher Power: 2^1,257,787-1 | black markets, collapse of governments. "National borders aren't even speed bumps on the information superhighway."