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From: ok@goanna.cs.rmit.oz.au (Richard A. O'Keefe)
Newsgroups: comp.arch
Subject: Re: What's in the '586?
Message-ID: <5814@goanna.cs.rmit.oz.au>
Date: 18 May 91 08:34:59 GMT
References: <1991May14.002130.4740@vax5.cit.cornell.edu> <42347@cup.portal.com> <1340@argosy.UUCP>
Organization: Comp Sci, RMIT, Melbourne, Australia
Lines: 14

In article <42347@cup.portal.com> mmm@cup.portal.com (Mark Robert Thorson)
wrote
>for enabling the on-chip FPU.  Each password is good for 10 gigaflops,
>i.e. you get 10,000,000,000 floating point operations.

Note that at one megaflop (and if the 586 FPU can't achieve that, who
wants it?) 10,000,000,000 floating point operations is about 3 HOURS
of FP computation.  Whatever you think about Intel, they aren't going
to expect people to buy passwords every few _hours_!  I swallowed the
"hex cache" hook, line, and sinker, but this gem told me it was a joke.
It was a wee bit alarming that so many comp.arch readers failed to do
the arithmetic to check this...
-- 
There is no such thing as a balanced ecology; ecosystems are chaotic.