Path: utzoo!utgpu!water!watmath!clyde!rutgers!cmcl2!beta!hc!ames!pioneer!eugene
From: eugene@pioneer.arpa (Eugene N. Miya)
Newsgroups: comp.arch
Subject: Re: More than 32 bits needed where?
Message-ID: <4991@ames.arpa>
Date: 21 Feb 88 02:01:59 GMT
References: <9495@steinmetz.steinmetz.UUCP> <3815@megaron.arizona.edu> <15781@beta.UUCP> <20022@bu-cs.BU.EDU>
Sender: usenet@ames.arpa
Reply-To: eugene@pioneer.UUCP (Eugene N. Miya)
Organization: NASA Ames Research Center, Moffett Field, Calif.
Lines: 37

In article <20022@bu-cs.BU.EDU> bzs@bu-cs.BU.EDU (Barry Shein) writes:
>What use would 1GB of main memory be on a Vax750 for example?

This IS Lipton's Massive Memory Machine at Princeton.  (Or did it have
128 MBs on a 750? ;-)

>NOTE: This is not to say that *no* one can make use of massive memory,
>but the applications diminish as the memory grows,

I would question this.

>The real point is
>that there are economic trade-offs and there is definitely a point
>where you'd be better off spending your money on a faster CPU
>(assuming finite money) than more memory.
> . . .
>poster's address might indicate a special case environment.)

Arvin Park (SIGMETRICS 87 and one of Lipton's grad students) noted that
they felt it was better to buy memory to fit the application then get
the CPU (note: it just tend to happen that the bigger expensive machines
also tend to have the bigger physical address spaces as well).  I think
that we should not separate the world into special case environments.
This is what got us into trouble to begin with.  Computing demand expands
to fill available compute power.  Ten years from now, we may think
what people put on machines would in some cases be frivolous (imagine
sending a spreadsheet back to the days of the early 360s: "Ah! such a
waste of cycles!").  The best thing to do is look at the computational
complexity of various problems: graphics is frequently O(n^2) and O(n^3),
mostly because of the data volume, and so on.

From the Rock of Ages Home for Retired Hackers:

--eugene miya, NASA Ames Research Center, eugene@ames-aurora.ARPA
  "You trust the `reply' command with all those different mailers out there?"
  "Send mail, avoid follow-ups.  If enough, I'll summarize."
  {uunet,hplabs,hao,ihnp4,decwrl,allegra,tektronix}!ames!aurora!eugene