dac@prolix.pub.uu.oz.au (Andrew Clayton) (04/13/91)
In article <1991Apr12.155350.20444@convex.com>, Steve Warren writes: > I wish... > > I wish that Commodore would redesign the A500 motherboard to utilize a 68020 > instead of a 68000. Call it the A500+ or something. Do the same with the > A2000. Include a socket for a 68881 chip. They wouldn't need to bump up the > memory bus to 32-bits; they could leave the motherboard memory just like it > is. The idea would be to have the 020 as the baseline processor for the Amiga > line. Bleych. As a spoilt owner of a 30Mhz A3001+A2500, I consider anything less to be a penance for past sins. I wish for; Virtually unlimited storage; Specifically, non self-destructing FRAM(*), a terabyte should do, with another couple of terabytes of backup on some medium that is really cheap to produce and use, tougher than old boots, and have a very very low error-rate [if you got a couple of terabytes backed up, even 1 in 100,000,000,000 means that you'll have a couple of errors!]. Of course, this is the stuff of fantasy at this current moment. FRAM is new and not very dense, and not in the least bit cheap. A terabyte for $100 is what I call cheap. :-). With so much storage/data, the CPU has to be able to get at it; currently the 68030 is limited to a 4Gigabyte address range. Bank switching sounds crass, so lets calmly switch to 64bit processors - 2^64 is a heck of a lot of storage, well, more than I can comfortably imagine (1.8*10^19 vs 1 terabyte which is 1*10^15) Such a processor would also have to be FAST. Say 10Gflops. Even then, it would take over a minute and a half to look at every location in memory, longer if you wanted to look for a specific something :-) Applications? Virtual reality, of course. With a terabyte to play with, you can do a whole slew of stuff. Plug in and drop out. Video, or rather, eye-computer interface, has to get a lot better. Sound is pretty well already at it's best. The input end of interfacing -- well, keyboards are a little lame. I'm just not convinced that powergloves are going to be any better [besides, if you're in a room with a virtually blinded D00D weilding powergloves, you have to give them a WIDE berth! "Personal space" would double. Ah well. I can dream. (*) FRAM is a type of memory that doesn't lose it's state when you remove power. It's already been developed [By some Australian company], and is currently being sold in 2Kbyte chips. I don't know if they have gotten around the 'breakage' problem -- changing the state of each bit is accomplished by changing the position of an atom inside a matrix of other atoms. After a couple of thousand million times, the atom 'breaks'. To read the state of each bit, you have to change it's state. The article I read on FRAM six months ago, stated that an FRAM chip could be induced to fail by programming a tight repeating loop, in something like six days continuous execution of the program. Since you don't lose data from FRAM [except by breaking it], you don't have to have hard disks anymore - replace them all with FRAM. Access to data is then limited by the speed of your memory<->cpu bus. I firmly believe that nothing, but nothing, is ever fast enough. Dac