Author: Vincent Diepeveen
Date: 05:41:22 02/27/99
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On February 26, 1999 at 22:16:12, Dann Corbit wrote: >It's currently the cheapest way to get extra horsepower. Consider the cost of a >6 or 8 cpu box verses a single CPU with the same throughput (if you could even >find one). > >I suspect that as masks shrink to some level they will have difficulty shrinking >them further. After you get to gamma rays, you will be hard put to find >something with a shorter wavelength than that. Certainly it would be a tough >task to make traces smaller than an atom. So at some point for sure the way to >more power will be more chips. Quite likely they will put them on a single >chip. So (for instance) you might get 16 K7 equivalents on a single chip, with >an additional CPU of some sort deciding how to assign the pipeline. > >I think multiple CPU's will be the wave of the future. In fact, the wave is >already here. Go price a 2CPU machine. They're not expensive. Even one with 4 >pentium pros will not break the bank. If you have a fat wallet, you can get 8 >chips and really fly. Indeed. The main question is how long will it take before they press a single cpu which in fact are several cpu's, which one can only use to fullstrength using special software, because the current concept of putting a bunch of chips together sucks too of course, as it's always cheaper to buy 1 of them. with AMD K7 coming, hopefully prices will drop from 4 cpu boxes and bigger boxes, still that will be too expensive for me. I could now buy a PII-450 dual for less than 3000 guilder, a dollar being currently around 1.9 guilder. I bought 2 300 cpu's sl2w8 and sl2yk, and clocked them to 450. i'm running NT 4.01 at home, which i bought for 60 guilder and linux doesn't work here properly as it doesn't support most AGP cards yet, from which my 45 guilder S3 trio3d (which is very fast!) is one of them (so only textmode works, and that sucks). This kind of cheap getting things will however be gone soon. We can only hope that 4 cpu boxes will drop, however probably not much overclocking in the future, and the new NT releases, which will be called 2000, will not support parallellism, when i'm informed well. Only the server version of 2000, which is unpayable, will do. So on the one hand we will see more dual systems getting cheaper, but it's questionable for how long as software is getting quite expensive for it, meanwhile i see parallellism as something for the future, but i'll be the last to be able to predict to you when everyone can afford it. Vincent
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