Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!tut.cis.ohio-state.edu!bloom-beacon!apple!voder!pyramid!wendyt
From: wendyt@pyrps5 (Wendy Thrash)
Newsgroups: comp.arch
Subject: Re: RISC as a "technology window"?
Message-ID: <63866@pyramid.pyramid.com>
Date: 24 Mar 89 22:17:27 GMT
Sender: daemon@pyramid.pyramid.com
Reply-To: wendyt@pyrps5.pyramid.com (Wendy Thrash)
Organization: Pyramid Technology Corp., Mountain View, CA
Lines: 22

In article <717@m3.mfci.UUCP> rodman@mfci.UUCP (Paul Rodman) writes:
>Now the guys that don't use floating point can just buy the i-chip, those
>that want screaming f.p. perf buy both. 

There's one large hidden cost here that people never seem to acknowledge:
If you sell even one system without floating-point hardware, some poor
programmer (or group) will spend the next twenty years (your product should
last so long) supporting floating-point operations on systems without the
floating-point hardware.

Hardware costs don't factor in the cost of phone calls from customers
complaining about slow (trapped and simulated) software floating point or
slow (-fswitch) hardware floating point or outmoded (someone wrote the
microcode years ago, and nobody understands it well enough to fix it now)
firmware floating point, or the costs of maintaining separate versions of
libraries, additional code in compilers, etc. (for compiler-generated
software floating point).

It's like the guy says on the commercial: You can pay me now (for extra
hardware) or pay me later (for extra support).  If you sell enough systems
at the lower price to cover the hidden costs, then you've made a good
decision, but do remember that the costs are merely hidden, not nonexistent.