Path: utzoo!attcan!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!cs.utexas.edu!uunet!lll-winken!vette!brooks
From: brooks@vette.llnl.gov (Eugene Brooks)
Newsgroups: comp.arch
Subject: Re: ATTACK OF KILLER MICROS
Message-ID: <35898@lll-winken.LLNL.GOV>
Date: 15 Oct 89 18:39:09 GMT
References: <35825@lll-winken.LLNL.GOV> <2121@brazos.Rice.edu> <6523@pt.cs.cmu.edu>
Sender: usenet@lll-winken.LLNL.GOV
Reply-To: brooks@maddog.llnl.gov (Eugene Brooks)
Organization: Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory
Lines: 31

In article <6523@pt.cs.cmu.edu> lindsay@MATHOM.GANDALF.CS.CMU.EDU (Donald Lindsay) writes:
>Gordon Bell, in the September CACM (p.1095) says, "By the end of
>1989, the performance of the RISC, one-chip microprocessor should
>surpass and remain ahead of any available minicomputer or mainframe
>for nearly every significant benchmark and computational workload.
It has already happened for SOME workloads, those which hit cache well
and are scalar dominated.  This was done without ECL parts.  The ECL
parts will only make matters worse for custom processors, as Bell indicates,
dominating performance for all workloads.

>I see the hot micros and the big iron meeting in the middle.  What
>will distinguish their processors?
Nothing.

>Mainly, there will be cheap
>systems. And then, there will be expensive ones, with liquid cooling,
>superdense packaging, mongo buses, bad yield, all that stuff.  Even
>when no multichip processors remain, there will still be $1K systems
>and $10M systems. Of course, there is no chance that the $10M system
>will be uniprocessor.
The $10M systems will be scalable systems built out of the same microprocessor.
These systems will probably be based on coherent caches, the micros having
respectable on chip caches which stay in sync with very large off chip
caches.  The off chip caches are kept coherent through scalable networks.
The "custom" value added part of the machine for the supercomputer vendor
to design is the interconnect and the I-O system.  The supercomputer vendor
will still have a cooling problem on his hands because of the density of
heat sources in such a machine.


brooks@maddog.llnl.gov, brooks@maddog.uucp