Linked by Nicholas Blachford on Tue 13th Jul 2004 21:56 UTC
After personal computers arrived in the 1970's they went through a series of revolutionary changes delivered by a series of different platforms. It's been over a decade since we've seen anything truly revolutionary, will we see a revolution again? I believe we could not only see revolution again, we could build it today.
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I remember the CDC 6600 quite well, having programed on one here in NYC in the mid sixties when I went to stuyvesant HS. I was taking FORTRAN IV (remember that?), and the computer was in the Courand Mathamatical Institute nearby. It was quite a machine back then. The 6000 and 6600 were the first supercomputers though the performance would just elicit a giggle today.
FPGA's are inefficient due to the poor routing. The best paths are rarely able to be taken. There are other problems as well.
It remains to be seen whether increasing processors beyond two in a desktop-like system is practical for most work. Only some problems can be effectively broken down in this way.
It's unlikely that multiple cell processors will be useful in anything but a graphics enviornment.
Back in the "old days" every machine was mostly unique, and had it's own OS. Pretty much the only things in common were the cpu's and the memory chips.
There were some S100 buss machines, and later some used CPM, but all the big guys built their own machines from the ground up. The IBM Pc killed most all of that.
Apple's Xcode 2, which will be released with Tiger next year, will do automatic compiling for the Altivec vector unit, which will give all programs access to that portion of the chip for the first time, as programmers now don't want to spend the time optimizing programs they don't (sometimes wrongly) think need it.