Path: utzoo!attcan!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!cs.utexas.edu!rice!titan!preston
From: preston@titan.rice.edu (Preston Briggs)
Newsgroups: comp.arch
Subject: Re: ATTACK OF KILLER MICROS
Message-ID: <2121@brazos.Rice.edu>
Date: 15 Oct 89 02:59:35 GMT
References: <35825@lll-winken.LLNL.GOV>
Sender: root@rice.edu
Reply-To: preston@titan.rice.edu (Preston Briggs)
Organization: Rice University, Houston
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In article <35825@lll-winken.LLNL.GOV> brooks@maddog.llnl.gov () writes:
>The best of the microprocessors now EXCEED supercomputers for scalar
>performance and the performance of microprocessors is not yet stagnant.

Is this a fair statement?  I've played some with the i860 and
I can write (by hand so far) code that is pretty fast.
However, the programs where it really zooms are vectorizable.
That is, I can make this micro solve certain problems well;
but these are the same problems that a vector machines handle well.

Getting good FP performance from a micro seems to require
pipelining.  Keeping the pipe(s) full seems to require a certain amount
of parallelism and regularity.  Vectorizable loops work wonderfully well.

Perhaps I've misunderstood your intent, though.  Perhaps you meant 
that an i860 (or Mips or whatever) can outrun a Cray (or Nec or whatever) 
on some programs.  I guess I'm still doubtful.  Do you have examples
you can tell us about?

Thanks,
Preston Briggs