🚀 go-pugleaf

In <MAC.91May29095345@gold.kpc.com> mac@gold.kpc.com (Mike McNamara) writes:


>	I've worked on two different commercially unsucessful
>heterogeneous processor machines.  I don't think that I am the common
>thread of failure ;-)

[description of two machines canceled due to lack of interest]

>	One common problem with both machines is that the benchmark
>results did not justify the cost of the machine. 

AHA I just realised that I have useful information to contribute here.
Here at ADP we built a _successful_ dual processor system; it ran a
(disk-based) RT11 like operating system and (virtual memory based)
Reality, simultaneously. For about 4 years they were our most popular
single model.

Our machine sold because we had just oodles of software for _each_
processor, and the cost and risk of rewriting was worse than the engineering
for the computer. (Two systems types and a hardware engineer for the
computer, 200 programmers working 5 years for the software). If the
stuff had _all_ been in _one_ (preferably popular) language, there
wouldn't have been any point.

Moral: It's only worth building the dual processor machine if you
_already_ have software that _can't otherwise_ be ported. See the
interesting dos and cp/m add-ins for all kinds of interesting computers.
Note also that binary converters and interpreters are gaining strength.

Drawback: interesting software is currently produced for DOS and unix.
Dos machines are dos machines, eh? And unix computers sell based on
how many interesting packages get ported. So the demand for a RISC
computer with 68xxx binary coprocessor is probably not worth the
engineering. Besides, we get better stuff for our 88k's than for our
68k's; I think that the software porting types have a personal fondness
for the RISC systems that biases the results.

All of this has strayed very wide from the RISC vs CISC long term
performance, which is heavily language dependent; unless someone
wants to make vectorising compilers that extract string functions
from c.


Martin Golding    | sync, sync, sync, sank ... sunk:
Dod #0236         |  He who steals my code steals trash.
A poor old decrepit Pick programmer. Sympathize at:
{mcspdx,pdxgate}!adpplz!martin or martin@adpplz.uucp