Re: Computer speed

[John Bate <bate@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

>Does anyone care to make some comment about today's (and in next 10 years)
>state of the art super computers? How do they compare with a Pentium 450 MHz?
>For computer Go, I guess the integer operation is more important. Thanks.

Serial-instruction-stream processors (like Pentium, PPC, etc.) won't get
significantly better than they are now. The curve is flattening out. (There
might be room for, say, another factor of 10 improvement, but that's not
significant in comparison to what has happened over the last 20 years.)
>From now on, parallelism of various kinds is where the speed improvements
will come from. To some extent, that has been done already, of course, with
superscalar pipelines, MMX, AltiVec, etc. but look for much more
parallelism in the not too distant future. Today's "supercomputers" already
use parallelism greatly, but it will move down and become widespread. (The
term "supercomputer" is already starting to disappear - as did
"microcomputers" which is what desktop computers used to be called. Anybody
hear your Mac or PC called a "microcomputer" recently?) Networks of smaller
computers are now being used for many big jobs - Pixar used a room full of
desktop computers, not a "supercomputer", to do the rendering for "A Bug's
Life", and networks of iMacs are being used to make a relatively
inexpensive "supercomputer" on some University campuses.

-J Bate

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Dr. John A. Bate                   | email: bate@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Dept. of Computer Science          | phone: (204) 474-6791
University of Manitoba             | FAX:   (204) 474-7609
Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada R3T 2N2 |
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