At 09:54 AM 3/16/2006, Joe Landman wrote:
Daniel Pfenniger wrote:
You need "really big" volumes to get there.
Yes, but it does not seem to me unreasonable to put such a card in
millions of PC's if the average applications run a bit faster and the
cost increase stays below the PC cost. After all
the 8087 math coprocessor of the i386 era did just that.
I agree that it makes sense to put such a card into millions of PCs. Not
at $8000/card. The issue is that the C600 costs quite a bit itself as it
is not being produced in volumes that can drive enough economies of scale
(yet). So the basic part will be a few k$. The card cost will be
(relatively speaking) low.
I think (WAG here) that Clearspeed wants people to design a socket onto
motherboards for them. Lowers the costs all around.
But that greatly increases the cost of the motherboards, and mobo
manufacturing is a very price sensitive business. every square cm of board
costs a bunch, all the way through the whole supply chain (mfr, storage,
shipping, etc.)
Interesting that there was HUGE economic pressure to integrate the FPU onto
the chip after the 386/387 era. And the whole reason the x87 wasn't
integrated wasn't because of marketing, but because of die size
limitations. With the 486, the dies got big enough to integrate, and
they've never looked back. I haven't even seen any mass-market
coprocessors of that type (i.e. closely coupled to the CPU) since
then. The coprocessors have tended towards performing some specific
function (e.g. graphics, or PCI bridge with integrated peripherals) and
have been fairly loosely coupled.
I would say that there is more potential for a clever soul to reprogram
the guts of Matlab, etc., to transparently share the work across
multiple machines. I think that's in the back of the mind of MS, as
they move toward a services environment and .NET
Lots of people have thought about that for a long time, including
Cleve Moeller. The potential clever soul should be well above
average, and considering MS products, well above MS average programmer.
At least there's lots of MS programmers to draw from, so on a statistical
basis, you'd expect one to pop up.
jim
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