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From: chuck@amdahl.amdahl.com (Charles Simmons)
Newsgroups: comp.arch
Subject: Applications for consuming processor power
Message-ID: <8222@amdahl.amdahl.com>
Date: Tue, 9-Jun-87 00:00:33 EDT
Article-I.D.: amdahl.8222
Posted: Tue Jun  9 00:00:33 1987
Date-Received: Thu, 11-Jun-87 06:30:06 EDT
Organization: Amdahl Corp, Sunnyvale CA
Lines: 66
Keywords: visual stimulation, hallucinations, lsd


Taking a trip in the way back machine...

A couple months ago, the subject of processing power came up.  Someone asked
if we really needed all the processing power that should be at our disposal
in a few years.  He suggested that software to use the processing power did
not exist and potentially would not exist.  Someone else suggested that
graphics would consume all the processing power we were capable of producing.
This argument was countered by suggesting that processing power was a
small marketing niche.

I would like to present arguments that suggest graphics applications are
far more than a marketing niche.  I recently had the opportunity to view
a number of video tapes of animation sequences produced on computers.  Many
of these videos are produced on machines like the Cray, and, it is estimated,
take not hours, days, or even weeks, but whole months to produce.  So the
software for the applications I will describe below exist today, and they
consume immense amounts of processor time.  This suggests that faster
processors will remain a necessity for a very long time to come.

Graphics Applications:

1)  Entertainment
    A)  Special effects sequences in movies.
    B)  Real time generated animation for video games.  This would make
video games possible that reacted to your inputs as an individual and
created a world for you to explore as you explored it.  The beginnings
of this idea can be seen in games that store lots of graphics on video
disk and every now and then present you with two or three options for
changing the sequence of graphics displayed on the screen.  Real time
generation of the graphics would allow for far more than two or three
choices every few seconds.
 
2)  Advertising
    This field would use graphics in much the same way as the entertainment
industry would use graphics for special effects.
 
3)  Military applications (video games for the Pentagon boys)
    The obvious application that comes to mind is training pilots in
expensive simulators that display an image of the outside world, updating
and generating this image in real-time.
 
4)  Research
    Simulating physical phenonmena on a computer has proven to be
a good way of gaining an understanding about how the universe works.
Some sample simulations are simulating the evolution of a galaxy or
planetary system, simulating the movement of atoms in a molecule,
simulating chemical reactions, etc.
 
5)  Education
    Providing students with video images of complex physical processes
that cannot be directly photographed would be a good learning tool.
Allowing the student to interact with the generated image would be an
even better learning tool.
 
Notice that there is a high degree of overlapping between these various
applications.  For example, the military applications and the research
applications are both forms of education.  Education, of course, is a
form of entertainment.

The basic concept behind all of these applications is that humans have
high bandwidth visual information channels.  It seems clear that currently
computers are not using the bandwidth of these information channels as
effectively as they could be used.
 
-- Cheers, Chuck