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From: roelof@idca.tds.PHILIPS.nl (R. Vuurboom)
Newsgroups: comp.arch
Subject: Re: Fed up with MIPS
Message-ID: <329@ssp1.idca.tds.philips.nl>
Date: 24 Oct 89 10:46:48 GMT
References: <76700077@p.cs.uiuc.edu> <318@ssp1.idca.tds.philips.nl> <1322@crdos1.crd.ge.COM>
Organization: Philips Telecommunication and Data Systems, The Netherlands
Lines: 55

In article <1322@crdos1.crd.ge.COM> davidsen@crdos1.UUCP (bill davidsen) writes:
>In article <318@ssp1.idca.tds.philips.nl>, roelof@idca.tds.PHILIPS.nl (R. Vuurboom) writes:
>|                                                       Racing cars today
>|     no longer represent the forefront of passenger car technology but have
>|     become a separate technology.
>
>  I admit that I have taken this out of context, but what are you
>driving? The cars on your showroom floor are loaded with stuff which was
>racing only 20 years ago, like fuel injection, supercharging (and
>turbocharging), 4 valves/cylinder, overhead cams, etc. These things are
>not on the sports models only, but in the sedans and station wagons.
>
But isn't this because racing car technology 20 years ago did indeed 
represent the forefront of passenger car technology. This is exactly
my point. This _domination_ of performance boosting (and the resulting 
performance boosting techniques) has ended in the passenger car technology 
of today. Which doesn't mean to say that a lot of work isn't going on in
this area. It is exactly because perfomance boosting was one of the
dominating attributes that racing car technology represented a forefront
of passenger car technology.


>  I think that micros will continue to enbody features developed in more
>expensive systems. 

In the sense that this is a general engineering trend I also think that this
will always be the case.

>
>  I don't see the feature migration or more mips ending as trends any
>time in the next two decades. 

Neither do I. Performance boosting in the automobile industry was a
dominating factor for some 70 years. I don't see any particular reason
why the computer industry will do it in less in fact assuming the same
maturity curve we would still have around 30 years to go before this
attribute is no longer dominant.

>  There certainly are limitations to demand, we're just not anywhere
>near them. When displays reach the limit of the human eye to extract
>information, the growth in that area will stop. The limit is somewhere
>around 1200 dpi, 24 bits or color, and whatever screen size you need for
>your working distance. The CPU limit will be reached when any problem
>can be solved and the answer displayed in less than 20 ms (the time the
>eye takes to notice a change). I haven't noticed that we're getting

Agreed with the minor point that I consider the human reaction time 
(200 ms) to be the determining factor. But why quibble over a mere factor
of 10? :-)

-- 
Artificial Intelligence: 
When computers start selling stocks because its Friday the 13th....
Roelof Vuurboom  SSP/V3   Philips TDS Apeldoorn, The Netherlands   +31 55 432226
domain: roelof@idca.tds.philips.nl             uucp:  ...!mcvax!philapd!roelof