Re: books on programming

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From: Eugene.Leitl@lrz.uni-muenchen.de
Date: Thu Jan 04 2001 - 12:43:58 PST


Kragen Sitaker wrote:

> SPARC, the MTA, and theoretically the new Alphas with SMT do this
> already; none of them are MISC. If you have MISC, you can actually

Yes, but I very much doubt these are $1 in quantities.

> have a bunch of concurrently-active engines on the same chip. The
> difficulty then becomes this: what do you feed them?

I dunno, if you can get ~kWord in few ns latency, and from SRAM
even faster this seems like a lot of memory bandwidth.

But, you won't be able to put up that many engines up there.

To start with, if your ALU is 1 kBit wide, you won't be
able to fit it into 10 kTransistors anymore. 100..200 kTransistors
for CPU plus networking, plus a few MTransistors for the memory,
and you have to keep the yield high, and thus the die inexpensive.

You would want to keep a second (possibly stripped) CPU, which
does OS and networking stuff without pushing around context bits,
but why having more? Rather make the thing smaller, and fit several
of them on a single die. Or use the whole wafer, as the networking
has enough redundancies so some 10-20 % of dead dies won't make a
difference.


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