> > There is a vast range of applications that cannot > > be managed in real time using existing single-core technology. > > please name one.
Your apparent lack of imagination surprises me. Surely you can see that a whole range of applications becomes possible when using a massively parallel system, when compared to a single-CPU system. You could perhaps also achieve these applications using a large network of 1000 normal computers, but that would be expensive and use a lot of space. I named two in another post: real-time animated raytracing, and instantaneous complex dsp over a long audio track. I'll also mention instantaneous video encoding. Instantaneous building of a complex project from source. (I'm defining instantaneous as less than 1 second for this.) There are also qualitatively different applications, such as effective computer vision, which can be achieved with parallel systems. The operation of animal eyes and brains is obviously massively parallel. A 6502 cpu could achieve a lot in its day with 4000 transistors at 2Mhz. A pentium 4 has 125 million transistors. So, with modern IC tech and excluding the necessary networking and RAM etc on the chip, one could put 31000 6502 processors on a single chip using pentium 4 integration technology, and I suppose you could also clock it up to perhaps 1 Ghz. I shouldn't have to explain how powerful something like this could be. 31000 8-bit 6502 processors running at 1Ghz, fully utilized, could achieve over 7 trillion 32-bit integer operations per second. That is over 7000 times more powerful than a pentium 4 having the same number of transistors. We have 31000 times denser ICs today, and at least 500 times higher clock speeds, but I do not see a 15.5 million times improvement in computer performance when comparing a 6502 to a pentium 4! That is because pentium 4 is a great hulking piece of crap and a waste of transistors. I could easily think of another hundred applications for parallel systems, but I'm sure that if you're intelligent enough to understand what I am saying you can think of your own examples. Sam
