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From: bzs@bu-cs.UUCP
Newsgroups: comp.arch
Subject: Re: Gould NP1
Message-ID: <6208@bu-cs.BU.EDU>
Date: Mon, 6-Apr-87 23:04:50 EST
Article-I.D.: bu-cs.6208
Posted: Mon Apr  6 23:04:50 1987
Date-Received: Thu, 9-Apr-87 03:14:28 EST
References: <505@sw1e.UUCP> <110@hippo.UUCP> <6123@bu-cs.BU.EDU> <261@winchester.mips.UUCP>
Organization: Boston U. Comp. Sci.
Lines: 55
In-reply-to: mash@mips.UUCP's message of 6 Apr 87 03:43:30 GMT
Posting-Front-End: GNU Emacs 18.41.4 of Mon Mar 23 1987 on bu-cs (berkeley-unix)


[Note: John and I have locked horns on this once before, maybe it would
be better conducted on INFO-FUTURES@BU-CS.BU.EDU?]

>Thank goodness that's the one problem we won't have!
>At least in some sectors of this business, there's an infinite
>appetite for performance out there. [Some of the CAD guys are great
>examples: tell them you've doubled performance, and they say
>"Oh good! we can simulate bigger circuits now....but it still
>takes too long: when we can we have 4 or 8X?" ]
>
>-- 
>-john mashey	DISCLAIMER: <generic disclaimer, I speak for me only, etc>

Well I'm not speaking about 4X or 8X but, perhaps, 50..1000X, I think
somewhere in there lies a qualitative difference.

My claim that we may find ourselves with an embarrassment of riches
when it comes to raw processing power is as much aimed at the massive
parallelism and all the software (that we use now) which can't use it
as just the fact that the software we now use will probably soon start
running so fast that a 2X speedup may cease to be much of an issue.

Before people start presenting existence proofs ("there exists a
program at site A which could benefit from a 10,000X speedup of
hardware) consider one important premise of mine:

In the beginning (let's say the start of the small computer
revolution, around 1970) no one was happy with the cycles they were
getting.

Probably around a year or two ago a sizeable percentage of folks,
if presented with the following questionairre:

	You have $XX,XXX to spend on your computer, would
	you spend it on:

	A) Doubling the CPU performance?
	B) A piece of software to ease your life?

would start answering 'B' (in the old days they would almost always
answer 'A' and figure out some way to work around 'B'.)

So, although there will probably always exist a community that is
cycle hungry, I claim that community is shrinking rapidly in numbers.
This is compounded by the fact that the entire community is growing,
mostly in the low-cycle-hunger category.

Don't get me wrong, I don't think we're "there" yet. But when I see
high-double-digit MIPs personal computers just over the horizon I
can't help but wonder how close we are coming to, say, 90% of the
computing community saying "oh, it's plenty fast, I just wish there
was some software to keep it busy".

	-Barry Shein, Boston University