Path: utzoo!utgpu!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!cs.utexas.edu!rice!titan.rice.edu!preston From: preston@titan.rice.edu (Preston Briggs) Newsgroups: comp.arch Subject: Re: 64 bits--why stop there? Message-ID: <1990Sep3.183848.19575@rice.edu> Date: 3 Sep 90 18:38:48 GMT References: <1990Sep1.062535.7541@rice.edu> <1990Sep3.045353.19321@nlm.nih.gov> Sender: news@rice.edu (News) Organization: Rice University, Houston Lines: 23 In article <1990Sep3.045353.19321@nlm.nih.gov> states@artemis.NLM.NIH.GOV (David States) writes: >preston@titan.rice.edu (Preston Briggs) writes: >>Bits are sort of useful as flags and such. >>However, I usually want to manage my bit-vectors in large chunks >>(getting that 32-way parallelism when ANDing and ORing integers). >Why not just support subdivided instructions (ADD_BY_BYTES ...)? >All of the logical operations can be viewed as arbitrarily divided >into subfields. >There are limits to how fast you can push clock speed. If you want >to process character strings and small integer operations faster, >parallelization seems like the way to go. >If you parallelize, it doesn't cost memory and you could potentially >win big on performance. Well, it's been done. A Connection Machine does all these things and more. -- Preston Briggs looking for the great leap forward preston@titan.rice.edu