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To: Tenchusatsu who wrote (230819)	4/20/2007 6:00:17 PM
From: Petz	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 275872

The vast majority of useful scalar operations and combinations of scalar operations (+-, *+, etc) are already available as SIMD instructions. For example, do you consider doing fast square roots to be "low hanging fruit?" Petz

To: Tenchusatsu who wrote (230819)	4/20/2007 6:27:41 PM
From: j3pflynn	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 275872

Tenchu - But they don't do any good until they're implemented in applications, and according to mmoy over at ihub, they've hardly taken any advantage of SSE3 yet, much less thought about SSE4.

To: Tenchusatsu who wrote (230819)	4/20/2007 6:43:23 PM
From: Dan3	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 275872

Re: So now we're going back to adding more instructions so that you don't have to execute as many. Fewer cycles to execute a task means more performance for less power. Back to CISC? But as "true" instructions instead of microcode? After all these years of RISC micro ops instead of X86 instructions?

To: Tenchusatsu who wrote (230819)	4/20/2007 8:10:40 PM
From: pgerassi	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 275872

Dear Tench: 4 socket servers are the trend for server consolidation via virtualization. Why have dozens of 1P and 2P servers when you can have just a few 4P servers running. Management, backups and support is much cheaper on 5 4P servers than 50 1P and 2P servers. If a majority of your virtual servers run Oracle for example, you can save lots of money by having 20P of licenses rather than 75P of them. That alone can be much more than the cost of 5 4P servers. It is also much more reliable as virtual servers can be moved among the physical servers from broken, updating or maintenance scheduled ones to active ones. They can be moved back when done. This way you can keep running even during repairs or upgrades. You can also make virtual servers larger or smaller depending on demand. Like Intuit, if they were consolidated on a few big servers, the E-File virtual server could be expanded to handle the flood of requests while the other virtual servers are cut back to make more resources available. When the flood is over, the E-File virtual server could be cut back to the normal size. Whats more likely to happen is that x86-64 servers will get larger. Its an axiom, work expands to soak up idle cycles. Just like the corollary, storage needs expand to use available storage. Pete

To: Tenchusatsu who wrote (230819)	4/20/2007 9:24:49 PM
From: combjelly	Respond to of 275872

"So now we're going back to adding more instructions so that you don't have to execute as many." Another spin of the Great Karmic Computer Wheel and we are back to CISC. It has been a while since I saw a good polynomial instruction... It was because processors were starting to exceed the speed of core memory that gave rise to CISC machines. A lot of the early machines had simple instructions, things like the PDP-8 were pretty RISC-like. MOS memory changed the game, leading to the rise of RISC. Ah, those were the days...