🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <85553@sun.uucp> khb@sun.UUCP (Keith Bierman - Sun Tactical Engineering) writes:
>In article <1798@ardent.UUCP> mac@mrk.ardent.com (Mike McNamara) writes:
>>|
[discussion of Mips chips in various boxes.]
>>
>>	And it makes sense, The Ardent Titan is up to four Mips R2000
>>each tightly intergrated with a custom vector processing unit. What do
>>you expect an M120 to do when given an Ardent `dvma' instruction?
>>(double precision A = B*C+D). (Probably bus error...).
>>
>
>C'mon old buddy, isn't there a way to generate scalar only code ?
>Shouldn't one expect scalar only code to be portable ? A vector
>version of gnu-emacs, for example,  might be nice...but being able to
>"plug and play" can be handy.

Turns out that a vectorized gnu-emacs is a loose.  The only place you
pick up speed is in bcopy, and then only for strings longer than the
vector length.  (At least that's what I found at Convex...  :-)
Overall, the vector version of gnu emacs was slower than the version
compiled without vectorization.   (And the version compiled with gcc
was better than either!)  

I have typically found that vectors and vector machines are usually
left to the pipe stress freaks and other fp grunts. But then, its been
a long time since I wanted to write any Fortran.  :-)

In most cases, the context switch overhead of getting on the vector
board(s) isn't worth the speed increase unless you can keep the dern
things fed for some large (relatively speaking) amount of time.

For general purpose computing, gimme something like what the people at Prisma 
are trying to do.  (fast GaAs, Unix, SPARC.)  

(Did that sound like an ad?  Sorry.. :-)

Disclaimer:  I work for Sun.  I used to work for Convex.  I have friends
who work for Prisma.  I don't own stock in any of the mentioned companies. 
I don't speak for Sun, Convex, or Prisma.  This has been a recording.


-- 
Jim Thompson					 	jthomp@central.sun.com
"I woudn't recommend sex, drugs, or insanity 	 	Network Engineering
for everyone, but they've always worked for me."	Sun Microsystems
			-- Hunter S. Thompson