Re: RC Transmission Lines (Wafer-Scale)

On Mon, 22 Oct 2007 12:59:19 -0400, Phil Hobbs
<pcdh@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

Robert Baer wrote:
Phil Hobbs wrote:

Forgive me for a rather nasty question.
What is this phoney push for more junk on a piece of silicon to
support what used to be relatively simple applications?

Now, Robert, be nice. ;)

For one thing, IBM (where I work) doesn't even make PCs anymore.

What was wrong with KISS?
In a personal computer, one does not need 2^10 core CPUs, or even dual
core; any CPU speed over 1Ghz is wasted, and for 99+% uses Win98Se is
more than good enough.

Depends on your problem set. I have a 14-processor Opteron cluster in
my lab, used only by me, for electromagnetic simulation and device
design. I put it together for a song (about $12 altogether), but some
of the problems I use it for can't be solved on a machine with less than
30 GB of RAM. Google probably isn't going to try to run on a single
uniprocessor box of any speed whatsoever.


Now, if one gets into graphics (read: games, design PCBs or other
complex artwork), then more speed becomes useful and Win2K becomes a
better choice.
Oh, you say, we "need" dual (or quad) core for graphics.
What the hell is that large graphics chip on the fancy video card for?
Boat anchor?
In fact, what good was the MMX instruction set for, since the sound
card already supported those functions.
On a cell phone guess what - its purpose is to send and receive calls,
period.
Want to do something else like portable music - players have been
around for over 10 years that do that; they just get smaller and store
more.
Etc etc and etc (courtesy of Yul Brynner in the King and I).

I'm glad you're happy with what you have. I use computers of varying
ages too...my office machines are 4 and 10 years old respectively, and
they're both dual-processor SMPs, because I push them pretty hard
sometimes. I've been writing multithreaded code since OS/2 2.0 came out
in 1992. I also like using old apps--for instance, Wordperfect 5.1+ for
DOS *flies* on a modern machine.

On the other hand, there are enough customers for the fastest machines
(who know very well what they need) to keep me in beer and skittles,
anyway. I like doing things that are useful and fun. Why do you do
what you do?

Cheers,

Phil Hobbs

It's ironic that most of the compute power in the world goes to
gaming. The most compute-intensive thing we do, in fact the only
compute-intensive thing we do, is fpga p+r. Design-rule checking the
most complex pc board we make takes about 5 seconds on a
standard-performance PC. The rest of what we do is dominated by our
DSL rate.

Even Spice usually runs fast. I guess em simulation could be slow, but
we rarely do that, thank Goodness.

Intel must be running scared; some day pc's will be good enough and
become as exciting as toasters, and $5 Taiwanese cpu's will be
powerful enough.

John





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