Path: utzoo!utgpu!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!rpi!zaphod.mps.ohio-state.edu!wuarchive!udel!rochester!pt.cs.cmu.edu!gandalf.cs.cmu.edu!lindsay From: lindsay@gandalf.cs.cmu.edu (Donald Lindsay) Newsgroups: comp.arch Subject: Re: Mass produced custom chips Message-ID: <12785@pt.cs.cmu.edu> Date: 25 Apr 91 04:02:56 GMT References: Organization: Carnegie Mellon Lines: 40 In article <2548@spim.mips.COM> mash@mips.com (John Mashey) writes: >In article <6286@optilink.UUCP> manley@optilink.UUCP (Dave Manley) writes: >>Now, maybe your question should be: Will the day ever come when we can >>cheaply, fast build custom CPUs? >One also needs to: > a) Cheaply and quickly generate the corresponding set of of > diagnostics for both design verification and production. > b) Cheaply and quickly generate the corresponding set of > compilers, debuggers, libraries.... In article colwell@pdx023.pdx023 (Robert Colwell) writes: [stuff I agree with, reinforcing the above] What you say is true, but not relevant to most of the published daydreaming about instant custom chips. Usually, the suggestion is that the chip will fit a special niche - such as a radar autocorrelator chip or a pattern matcher chip - or will be a coprocessor (in some loose sense of the word). The general-purpose market is to be avoided, not only for the good reasons which you gave, but also because it's increasingly hard to find big wins there. In a niche, it may be possible to get an enormous win: the Splash board is sometimes 200 times faster than a 16K-PE CM-2. In particular, most daydreams have been about casting a single specific algorithm to hardware. If a chemical-bonding problem is going to take days to grind, why not make an overnight chip, that has parallel execution units, one for each aspect of that particular molecule? And (more down to earth, or anyway MOSIS) why shouldn't an encryption chip have a 500-bit-wide ALU? In the science cases, the assumption is that the hardware verification will be somewhat application-specific, too. The user would be expected to have some test cases, and perhaps include e.g. checks to see if a physically conserved property (angular momentum?) has actually been conserved. -- Don D.C.Lindsay Carnegie Mellon Robotics Institute