Re: Long Rant

[Mike Losh <mlosh01@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

There has been a lot of useful discussion here, even if it is a bit heated at 
times.  It has been useful in the sense of starting to highlight some of the 
marketing problems MISC has.  I still think it is very early to criticize F21 to
the extent it has been -- there isn't even a prototype yet!  Of course MISC will
not be a Great Thing for all people with computer applications, but together we 
can figure out where MISC makes sense and how to present it to the rest of the 
world.

Jeff Fox said:
>Once again, F21 is not designed for the conventional workstation/academic
>market and SPECmarks don't make any sense in any way as a metric to
>make any judgements about F21.

Excuse any ignorance on my part about the SPEC benchmarks, but is a port of the 
SPECint integer benchmark possible for F21?  Or is a C compiler MANDATORY for 
the benchmark to be considered a true "SPEC" benchmark?  It seems to me that one
could port the source into hand-optimized F21 machine code which performs the 
same or equivalent computations.  If SPECint requires wide (64 bit?)  
computations, F21 may not be extremely efficient, having to string 20 bit ops 
together, but so what?  At least then we could say "F21 provides a SPECint of XX
out of SRAM, YY out of DRAM, at cost $$."  The Great Masses could start 
thinking, "Hmm, I can get 1/3 of the SPECInt of an Alpha workstation for 1/10th 
the cost..." (or whatever the numbers are going to be).  Hopefully, SPECint 
running on a cluster of 8 (or whatever) of F21s will be really impressive for 
the price.

SPEC benchmarks may not be interesting to most MISC readers (who envision 20 bit
apps), but I think most workstation buyers/users expect to see them.  If F21 and
later chips are going to be a commercial success in the scientific and 
engineering market, we must convince many of these people to take a look.  If we
can get a foot in the door with SPECint, it may be easier to convice them of the
advantages of MISC for their applications.  Later P32s :) and P64s? :D should be
an even easier sell.  Once they get started, they will figure out how best to 
structure their applications and data to make it efficient to use MISC.  If MISC
cannot crack the scientific and engineering markets, it may be relegated to much
more specialized niches like video (although that could be a big market by 
itself: set top boxes, home web-crawlers, etc.).

Of course, the best way to convince someone that scientific and engineering work
is possible with MISC is to show them someone who is already doing such work.  
I'm sure that many of the old mainframe diehards expecting to see their 
benchmarks running on micros where later converted when they saw powerful 
mainframe-type applications RUNNING on micros.  

May those who have proposed MISC applications have a great success and pull the 
others (kicking and screeming) along!
--
Michael A. Losh                 Standard disclaimers apply.