Path: utzoo!attcan!utgpu!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!sharkey!tygra!dave From: dave@tygra.UUCP (David Conrad) Newsgroups: comp.arch Subject: Re: Architecture questions Summary: Bit addressing good for applications too Keywords: Bit Addressing, Huffman Codes, LZW Compression Message-ID: <390@tygra.UUCP> Date: 9 Sep 90 11:29:06 GMT References: <10057@goofy.Apple.COM> <2516@l.cc.purdue.edu> <6838.26e7f109@vax1.tcd.ie> Reply-To: dave@tygra.UUCP (David Conrad) Organization: Moore Software, Detroit, MI Lines: 35 In article <6838.26e7f109@vax1.tcd.ie> rwallace@vax1.tcd.ie writes: ;Consider the following kinds of operations: ;1. Scientific and engineering work (floating-point) ;2. Text processing (byte addressing) ;3. Transaction processing (floating-point, bytes and fixed-length integers) ;4. Graphics (best done in chunks as large as the CPU can handle, using barrel ; shifters and masking) ;5. Compiling (integers and pointers) ; ; - in no particular order. These make up something over 99% of all computation. ;Hence hardware is designed to make them fast. This means dealing with ;floating-point, integers and bytes fast. To be sure you could probably list 50 ;different kinds of algorithms that would benefit from bit addressing but these ;make up less than 1% of the computation that gets done, and the extra hardware ;would slow down other operations and increase costs. Why should 99% of users ;pay in money and time for something that will improve processing speed for 1%? ;-- ;Russell Wallace, Trinity College, Dublin I'll only list two: Huffman coding and LZW compression. But notice, every one of the things you've mentioned typically use large disk files. And I've listed data compression algorithms. If data could be uncompressed on the fly faster, then this would be done more often - with a decrease in the disk I/O needed by these operations which would be paid for in computation time. Disk reads vs. number crunching cycles. My guess is there would be a net gain in efficiency there. -- David Conrad | "To Do Is To Be" -- Socrates dave@tygra.ddmi.com | "To Be Is To Do" -- Plato I cannot prevent the below. | "Do Be Do Be Do" -- Sinatra -- = CAT-TALK Conferencing Network, Prototype Computer Conferencing System = - 1-800-825-3069, 300/1200/2400/9600 baud, 8/N/1. New users use 'new' - = as a login id. <>> = E-MAIL Address: dave@ThunderCat.COM