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From: cik@l.cc.purdue.edu (Herman Rubin)
Newsgroups: comp.arch
Subject: Re: Killer Micro II
Summary: Most mathematical calculations need little data
Message-ID: <2482@l.cc.purdue.edu>
Date: 28 Aug 90 00:53:00 GMT
References: <527@llnl.LLNL.GOV> <603@array.UUCP>
Organization: Purdue University Statistics Department
Lines: 20

In article <603@array.UUCP>, colin@array.UUCP (Colin Plumb) writes:
> Maybe it's a new chip, but BIT announced 100 MFLOPS chips early
> this year.  I heard about separate FP add and multiply units, with 192
> bits (128 read, 64 write, from their point of view) of 100 MHz bus
> each.  2 cycle (20 ns) latency, so they do 50 MFLOPS flow-through.
 
> Now if you can just supply the 2.4 GBytes/second of data these babies
> need...  It's still not going to be cheap.  Or easy to cool (28 watts
> out of one chip I can almost read by).  But it's going to kill multi-board
> ALUs.

There are plenty of mathematical calculations which need lots of computing,
but use little data.  I doubt if these vaunted machines will be much good
at a three-dimensional numerical integral, for example.  And how good is
their integer arithmetic?  If accurate calculation is needed, and this is
not all that unusual, floating point is essentially useless.
-- 
Herman Rubin, Dept. of Statistics, Purdue Univ., West Lafayette IN47907
Phone: (317)494-6054
hrubin@l.cc.purdue.edu (Internet, bitnet)	{purdue,pur-ee}!l.cc!cik(UUCP)