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Politics : Foreign Affairs Discussion Group -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: GST who wrote (142979)	8/11/2004 1:34:34 PM
From: Sun Tzu	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 281500

Way back when I actually cared a great deal about computer design, there was a company called (I think) Thinking Machines. They made single bit (or was it 4-bit) processor that could be arbitarily combined to make more advanced processing units. I don't know what came of them, but seeing how they have not made news for ages, I suspect they died. So yes, the design has always been there. Speed is an issue in the sense that the faster the processing unit, the smaller the fraction of time it has to spend on parallel overhead. Computer engineers do not measure speed in MIPS (Meaningless Information on Performance for Salesmen). A VLIW machine may have a much lower clock speed, but engineers will discuss that speed in normalized forms which will make it fast indeed. The same can be said for the alternative designs you are thinking of.