davidsen@crdos1.crd.ge.COM (Wm E Davidsen Jr) (10/24/89)
Interesting to note that some of the things we use a Cray2 for are just huge, not all that compute intensive. Many could be done on a micro, if it had 4-8GB memory. That seems to be a real limit of current implementations, that even though the chip can address GB of memory, the bus, backplane, or whatever does not give a practical way to add large memory. Assume for a moment a micro, be it 486, 68040, SPARC, R3000, state of the art system to which you wanted to add 4GB of memory. Is there any system which could do this, assuming that someone wanted to buy it? There are some problems which really don't lend themselves to solution in virtual memory, as we proved to our satisfaction when evaluating mini-supers. If the performance hit for paging is "unacceptable" for scalar operations, I guess it would be "unthinkable" for vectors. Would anyone like to guess the price of memory in five years? ten? I can remember selling 100ns static boards, 16k for $400, and selling hundreds of them in two years (1978-79). If someone had said $100/MB I would not have guessed it would happen in my lifetime. -- bill davidsen (davidsen@crdos1.crd.GE.COM -or- uunet!crdgw1!crdos1!davidsen) "The world is filled with fools. They blindly follow their so-called 'reason' in the face of the church and common sense. Any fool can see that the world is flat!" - anon