Interesting. I've been saying for years that instead of just making ever-faster processors that can access ever-larger memory spaces, we ought to try making some processors with onboard memory (think 'cache' if you must), which can then be connected into clusters. Setting up DMA channels between the processors. as well as pipeline architecture to let one chip stream its output to the input of the next, would make for some really powerful configurations.
On 8/6/07, David Nicol <davidnicol@gmail.com> wrote:
The following is copied and pasted from the comments on
http://www.informationweek.com/windows/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=201202009
Peter Kogge was forced out of IBM for demonstrating that memory chips
can make use of the thousands of bits that are actually read in every
memory cycle if processors are built into the memory chips. Even if
only 8088 type processors were built into a chip that also had the
full adressable 1 megabyte of memory and operated at current processor
cycle speads, the computing, and gaming capacity of the billions (Carl
Sagan) of transistors in modern PCs would be beyond the imagination of
the most avid gamers. The hundreds of processors that could be built
on a single chip could be connected by data paths that resemble the
operations of data paths of nerve cells in the brain. Every nerve cell
in the brain has hundreds if not thousands of connections to other
cells and a few giga-bytes of data storage. USB might not be a bad
starting design, after all, with user programmable processors and RAM
with the 4 gigs of eprom. There could even be an 8088 section of the
thumb processor that could run DOS 3.1 and WordPerfect 4.7(After all,
WordPerfect was used with most of the DOS 3.1 units.) right on the
"ThumbDrive". Vista could connect the screen and keyboard in a few
seconds to the virtual screen and keyboard in the RAM of the THUMB
computer. A much simpler program running under Caldera Dos could do
the same in a few milliseconds. Such a system would do almost all of
the word processing that is now done on super-pentiums with 4 gigs of
ram.
--
Prioritize based on common sense?
Is that some kind of joke?
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