🚀 go-pugleaf

1. Conditional move instruction is certainly useful.  I was involved
   in writing a compiler for the Acorn RISC Machine (ARM), which has
   the unusual feature that all instructions are conditionally
   executed, with a 4-bit field to specify the condition (the most
   common condition being "always").  Any conditional branch over
   a short sequence of instructions was optimised into a short
   sequence of conditionally-executed instructions, which reduced
   the code size and saved flushing the pipeline (there was no smart
   branch prediction or delayed branches).

   You can't play quite the same game with just conditional move,
   but things like "if (a < b) a = b;" will work nicely.
   Note that the SPARC Version 9 architecture also includes
   conditional move (together with 64-bit extensions & much else).

3. I believe 1000 tera-FLOPS = 1 peta-FLOPS ?  However, anyone using
   this word before 1997 should be regarded as a hype-merchant.
   Hennessy & Patterson refer to performance on the Perfect benchmarks
   which averages about 1% of peak MFLOPS rates - the real challenge
   for the millenium is to regularly attain > 1GFLOPS performance
   on these dusty decks.

   I'm not sure what Cray are up to, but with current technology it's
   more likely to be 300GFLOPS than 300TFLOPS - this would be roughly
   in line with Fujitsu VPP500, TMC CM-5, Meiko CS-2, and could be
   achieved with around 1000 or 2000 Alpha processors, which is a
   manageable number.
  
-- 
Richard Cownie (a.k.a. Tich), Meiko Scientific Corp 
email: richard@meiko.com
phone: 617-890-7676
fax:   617-890-5042