mash@mips.COM (John Mashey) (06/10/90)
In article <6583@amelia.nas.nasa.gov> eugene@wilbur.nas.nasa.gov (Eugene N. Miya) writes: >I would say we are infatuated, or have a fetish on CPUs, and I/O will >continue to be a problem. So what is industry going to do about it? 1) I/O will always be a problem, for all of the usual design reasons, and especially when working near the edge on peak performance. 2) However, I would suggest that it will start getting better, at least in certain ways, and especially in price/performance. 3) The reason is the same kind of dynamic that has led to SCSI & Ethernet chips, for example. Specifically, when the time is "right", people are induced to do fast, high-integration (and therefore fairly cheap) chips that help solve parts of the I/O problem as well. 4) Consider, for example, Ethernet support. a) Early on, Ethernet support was a board full of logic, not cheap. However, since it was in a supermini, it was still a small fraction of the price, so it probably didn't matter too much. b) As microprocessor systems came along, Ethernet support is now down to a LANCE chip or equivalent, and a little bit of glue: 1) Workstations NEEDED cheap Ethernet. 2) There was a market for large volumes, hence worth doing. 5) Same kind of progress in SCSI. I would claim that the following dynamic exists: 1) Workstations and other micro-based products are zooming upward in CPU performance at fairly low cost. 2) Such machines could certainly use better I/O. 3) The volumes make it interesting for people to design chips to support such things, whereas this has seldom been true in the super- or mainframe markets. 4) Over the next few years, we will see increasing interest in people looking to sell support chips for: faster & wider busses I/O muxing & buffering network interfaces disk control, such as for RAIDs 5) There used to be huge numbers of different architectures for CPUs, whereas now more people use CPUs, and design I/O systems. In some parts of the design space, it is easy enough to design computers with just a few VLSI chips that include both CPU & I/O. I think that space will enlarge to much higher performance levels, as the faster VLSI CPUs make it both necessary to get fast inexpensive I/O, and enough volume to make it interesting. 6) I'd still expect that supercomputers will have an edge in this area, although I'd be amazed if killer-micros-with-(forthcoming better I/O) don't blow them away on I/O price/performance basis (but not absolute performance, of course). -- -john mashey DISCLAIMER: <generic disclaimer, I speak for me only, etc> UUCP: mash@mips.com OR {ames,decwrl,prls,pyramid}!mips!mash DDD: 408-524-7015, 524-8253 or (main number) 408-720-1700 USPS: MIPS Computer Systems, 930 E. Arques, Sunnyvale, CA 94086