Hi.

> The viability of this idea, however, really comes down to the
> question: How slow is the access of the main RAM from the SPE's.  Is
> this significantly slower than on a traditional modern computer?

I think you are wrong here Ben or at least you are missing one serious problem.
As far as I know the GP fitness evaluation code is a largely branching stuff
that can hardly be vectorized and the SPEs have weak or no branch predictor
at all and small cache and are good precisely at the other kind of code,
namely highly vectorized code with few branching points. I would not be
surprised if it turned out that with the type of code you have to execute to
do GP fitness evaluation the SPEs will be 10 times slower than an Athlon
processor and the whole gain from having 8 such units will be lost.
So it is not just the memory issue -- look at the processing speed as well.

- lk

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