On 16 Jun 99, at 10:24, Willmore, David wrote:
> >
> The ARM are interesting processors. They're great for embedded
> applications--
> which is where they have been specializing. I haven't looked at them in
> detail
> since the ARM7 core days, so I might have missed something, but I don't
> remember them being all that fast per/MHz. I remember their goals being
> small code space, low power usage, and small die. Still would be cute to
> have your HD do LL testing....
>
I believe some of the current PDAs use StrongARM at speeds
approaching 200 MHz. They have no floating point. There is at least
one LL test client written for StrongARM.
> > I am guessing that the minima of the Price/Performance curve has not yet
> > touched Pentia. Maybe the best P/P is the Z80, I am certain that it can
> > square and subtract 2 (still). This is not completely in jest.
Eh?
Almost twenty years ago I was running a TRS-80 Model 1 (1.77 MHz
Z80). If you could wring one single-precision floating-point
operation per millisecond from it, you were doing quite well. There
wasn't even an 8-bit integer multiply opcode, you had to multiply
even short integers in software.
I know a lot of Z80s were manufactured, and I guess you might even be
able to find the odd one still in use somewhere (NASA's immensely
successful Voyager spacecraft use an even more primitive
microprocessor), but I reckon that, for LL tests, the combined power
of all the Z80s ever manufactured is less than that of a couple of
today's standard desktop PCs.
Based on the fact that Intel are apparently holding back the 100MHz
FSB versions of the Celeron until Feb 2000 (according to August's
"Personal Computer World" which arrived with me today) - the theory
is that Intel don't want to undermine the PII/PIII market - I would
suggest that the PP curve for current processors minimises somewhere
around the Celeron 400. For complete systems the story may be
different. I suggest that, when people make these sorts of
comparisions, they also bear in mind the price per iteration in terms
of energy consumption - a slow system built for next to nothing from
scrap-heap parts will cost just as much to "feed" for a year as a
fast system bought or built from new parts.
Did anyone else see the news story about the PlayStation II?
Apparently the US government has classified it as "strategic
ordnance" because its theoretical processing power falls into the
"supercomputer" range!!!
Regards
Brian Beesley
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