Path: utzoo!mnetor!uunet!lll-winken!lll-crg.llnl.gov!brooks
From: brooks@lll-crg.llnl.gov (Eugene D. Brooks III)
Newsgroups: comp.arch
Subject: Re: Why build TF-1 if you have its uniprocessor chips?
Message-ID: <5717@lll-winken.llnl.gov>
Date: 2 Apr 88 02:36:01 GMT
References: <12176@brl-adm.ARPA> <1988Mar11.215238.976@utzoo.uucp> <11437@duke.cs.duke.edu> <4297@hoptoad.uucp> <30@spar.SPAR.SLB.COM>
Sender: usenet@lll-winken.llnl.gov
Reply-To: brooks@lll-crg.llnl.gov.UUCP (Eugene D. Brooks III)
Organization: Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory
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>In article <4297@hoptoad.uucp> gnu@hoptoad.uucp (John Gilmore) writes:
>'Twould seem that rather than build one TF-1 with 32,000 chips, you
>would do better selling 32,000 workstations (~ half of all the Suns
>in existence) that ran 16x as fast as Sun-3's.
I would put serious doubts on how soon we would need 32000 of these buggers
in one box, but no matter how fast your processor is, two of them in a shared
memory configuration done right is twice as fast.  We would have little problem
using a few tens or so effectively on "real dirty physics codes" at the moment
and doubling the number each year as more is learned makes quite a lot of
sense. I would agree that 32000 workstations would generate a higher profit,
but that may not be what the TF-1 is all about.