In an industry that only clocks progress on linear semi-log plots
true innovation has become rare -- it's far too risky at the high
end.
Right --- it's the anti-Innovator's-Dilemma. As long as focusing on
making stuff smaller can get you 50+% improvements every year, you'll
beat all the Teras and Symbolicses just by doing that.
In DSP-land (the last refuge of VLIW?) strange innovations can find a
home.
A couple of years ago* I'd wondered about gray-coded PC increments.
Well, the DSP people haven't gone that far, but they do offer the
option of bit-reversed autoincrementing index registers. By counting
left-to-right (x000, x100, x010, x110, x001, x101, x011, x111, x000...)
one can get various power-of-two circular buffers "for free".
That may seem like a lot of trouble to save a mask op, but there's a
good market reason to provide the feature: bit reversal simplifies
twiddling FFT butterflies.
-Dave
:: :: ::
* "patricia indices for directed graphs"
http://lists.canonical.org/pipermail/kragen-discuss/2002-February/
000739.html
