🚀 go-pugleaf

Jim Williams <williams@tiac.net> writes:

>How about a single step SIN lookup?????  All I want is a little 
>intellegence in the hardware so that the well defined things the
>computer has to do over, and over, and over, and over, are quicker.
>There are some really obvious things which those millions of transisters
>could be doing.

You _are_ a software person, admit it. "A single step SIN lookup". Have you
ever ever in your life wondered how a computer calculates a SIN? As a Taylor
series, of course, and you have to take a numer of its elements before you
can say "well, this is close enough".

Or are you seriously suggesting a lookup table? Well, if we limit the
precision to 16 bit (and think about it --- that's fixed point, not
floating!), you'd need 1Megabits of ROM to store the lookup table. Now
through clever cheating and exploitation of symmetry you might get that down
by, say, an order of magnitude. But then, you lose that order of magnitude
again when you just want 3 more bits of precision.

>Because the poor compiler is still having to deal with a 1960s hardware
>design.  This means that it's much more difficult to create a program
>which is both small and fast.  (It doesn't help that many apps developers
>have no sense of craft.)

You sound like you whine about how lousy processors are these days, because
they are not Super-CISC.
If you really want to whine about something, complain about the still
dominant von Neumann architecture. But I don't think radically new designs
have hardware problems, it's that we are just not able to program the
things. So you software people really suck :-)

Bernie

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Anybody out there who knows how to connect a Wyse terminal keyboard to a PC
_without_ the terminal in between? Current keyboard lses chracters evr so
oftn.............  Getng wrs al te im. Hp!