Re: relative complexity of hardware and software (was: pick 'n' place machines

"Terry Given" <my_name@xxxxxxxx> wrote in message
news:aU3Ve.10698$iM2.975279@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
> [...]
> look at the number of screw-ups intel makes, versus micro$oft. The
> hardware guys are winning hands down.

Well, I agree with most of the points you made. But on this particular
point, I have to say I think there is a considerable difference in
complexity, on any metric I can think of, between something like Windows and
something like a Pentium. The feature set of Windows is larger; the number
of differently-purposed functional components is larger. A P4 Prescott has
more transistors than Windows has lines of code, but you have to consider
that most of those transistors are just vast arrays of identical storage - a
comparison between Windows' size in memory (if all of it were loaded
simultaneously) versus the Pentium's number of transistors might be more
fair, and there Windows is considerably (and unfortunately) larger than the
Pentium. So I think that holding them to the same standard of number of
bugs is not quite fair; it might be more fair to hold them to "number of
bugs per bit". In fact, that's sort of what I'm wondering: on a standard
like that, would software still lose?

And as soon as we get away from a single chip and into a system, like for
instance a motherboard, we start seeing the bug rate escalate. There are
plenty of problems with motherboards - incompatibilities with hardware,
timing problems, power supply problems. I'm not aware of ever having
encountered a CPU bug, but I have certainly torn my hair out over
motherboard bugs.


.

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