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From: howard@cpocd2.UUCP (Howard A. Landman)
Newsgroups: comp.arch
Subject: Re: 64 Vs 32
Message-ID: <508@cpocd2.UUCP>
Date: Tue, 17-Mar-87 17:26:09 EST
Article-I.D.: cpocd2.508
Posted: Tue Mar 17 17:26:09 1987
Date-Received: Thu, 19-Mar-87 07:06:50 EST
References: <3810013@nucsrl.UUCP> <985@rpics.RPI.EDU> <1310@ucbcad.berkeley.edu>
Reply-To: howard@cpocd2.UUCP (Howard A. Landman)
Organization: Intel Corp. ASIC Services Organization, Chandler AZ
Lines: 17
Keywords: gigabyte memory usage image processing
Summary: Who will need more than 1 GB of memory?

In article <1310@ucbcad.berkeley.edu> faustus@ucbcad.berkeley.edu (Wayne A. Christopher) writes:
>What we need to ask is, who will need more than ~1G of memory?

For quick construction of hypothetical memory-hogs, I always think of image
processing.  Let's say you're working on data from an imaging spectrophotometer
which has 256 frequency bands and 16-bit resolution in each band, and your
image is 4K by 4K pixels.  That's 2^(8+1+12+12) = 2^33 = 8 GB memory to hold
just *ONE* *IMAGE*.  Sure would be nice to get it all in memory at once.  Of
course, it would also be nice to have a processor-per-pixel; that's only
16 M processors, each with at least 512 bytes of working memory, is that too
much to ask?  Today, you might be able to do it with 256 Connection Machines
($1 M each) connected in a big array or hypercube arrangement ... shouldn't
cost more than a quarter billion if we can get a volume discount. :-)
-- 

	Howard A. Landman
	...!intelca!mipos3!cpocd2!howard