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[f-cpu] Offtopic...



Yann Guidon wrote:

> that is the best point to start. x86 proves that we can
always scale up
> and the F-CPU model has some headroom.

*ntel proved that an extemely stupid, ugly and
badly-designed-but-with-good-marketing
architecture can survive trough the years. I thought these
days what the hell is the reason
to have mountains of x86 boxes around us, instead of some
shiny ARM/MIPS/SPARC/
PPC/m68k/Alpha/HP-PA RISC etc... (actually, I personally own
also an UltraSPARC :) box,
but this is an exception from the generic rule...) . And the
answer may be is in the critical mass.
Tons of software is written for the last 24 years (from 8088
'till now), and it's a devil hard to escape
from such a heritage. This is the reason for the big failure
of Itanium(1/2) arch. Intel acquired specs for
the beauty "Alpha" from old Compaq divisions and (may-be)
part of their engineering teams.
But the market cannot accept something different from their
thingie-wingie boxes... Arrggh...
 The story with M$ is absolutely the same - critical mass
drives the world markets,
and desktop machines have IMHO over 85% market share. And
while thinking about
multi-core performance of F-CPU, it must not be ignored the
fact, that for over 85% of
possible applications the core (established on the market,
of course :) ) will be single-core.

And one more thing, about multi-core performance. I know
that parallel tasking gives exactly
the absolute performance (e.g. explicit paralelelism,
reminds me for EPIC :) ), this is a
double-edged knife - only dynamic applications, and a few of
standard applications can be
benefit. Multimedia, number crunching, compressing... But,
what we can do for
an e-mail client, word processor, spreadsheet. If
application is multi-threaded, OK. But
it will not be an excuse to install several cores :) on a
box to have separate cpu for GUI thread,
database thread, communication thread, and etc. Sometimes I
recall one software developer's
joke - "What's the difference between P266MHz and
P4-2.4Ghz?" - "The time, cpu waits
you to press the next key."

Sorry for the offtopic... x86 unleashes so many words from
my mouth, and most of them
unpleasant... Funny, wasn't this the reason for starting the
F-CPU?

Have a good rest, guys!

Nikolay Dimitrov, a.k.a. PicMaster
Software Developer



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