Re: SPECint, Video, Marketing
- To: MISC
- Subject: Re: SPECint, Video, Marketing
- From: MLosh01@xxxxxxx
- Date: Mon, 7 Aug 1995 23:02:49 -0400
I think it was Eugin who said...
>I think you are terribly overoptimistic here. This guys will be seeing
>bad float values and... Hold it, you just said SPECint?
Yes, maybe I was a little opptimistic here. I _was_ focusing on integer
benchmarks because (1) F21 would be trounced in a floating point
comparison, and (2) it seems that many applications could be written
using integer math, based on many comments here and elsewhere. Of course,
most scientists and engineers only know or want to use floats. I have
not figured out how the F21 compares to Alpha on integer tasks. Maybe Alpha
would kill it. I am hoping that a ring of F21s has a chance.
>Scientific/engineering market is too small/conservative to be of
>any value and fun markets is big bucks/major players and the cake
>is already cut (and partly eaten), already. Anything I forgot?
I don't have any $$ figures on size of the scientific/engineering market,
but it must be pretty high profit. Why are there so many vendors who
want to sell me-too Unix boxes?
> [Video] _is_ a big market. If Jeff were not UltraTech but NEC or
> Nintendo and had his product out by now, there wouldn't be any problems.
> If he can persuade big players into buying the technology, we will see
> F21s cropping >up everywhere.
Yes, this would be a huge market. Unfortunately, I think it will get
very bloody in the next few years. It seems like *EVERY* major
technology company, whether hardware or OS or software, wants to be in
the set-top box market. There will be lots of technologies offered.
Most of them will fail in the competition of the market. Maybe someone
will appreciate MISC and sneak the F21 into a good product. But it will
face some really big opponants. And I suppose that MISC seems very risky,
especially to conservative Japanese companies. If there was a standard
for Interactive TV, for example, someone could try to implement it on F21
and show how inexpensive it could be done with MISC. I don't think Taos
qualifies yet. Maybe it will. MISC video needs more color depth for
many of these applications -- at least 10 bit pixels instead of 5. OTOH,
Jeff plans to use 3 F21s to generate 18 bit color. That should be
interesting. :)
>> ...show them someone who is already doing such work.
>Even if they would see it happen, it won't sell if they have to learn
>a new language/enviroment and switch to parallel programming first.
>No way.
Maybe so. :( I hope SOME of you try it! Here's a crazy idea... What
if someone with really good and cheap technology offered a private
supercomputing center with programming and opperations services on the
side to the scientific and engineering community. It wouldn't matter if
the technology was really weird (maspar MISC, MISC+DSP, etc.) because the
center would accept requirements on the algorithm level and code it for
their weird machines. Then they would run it for the scientist/engineer
customer and trasmit the results back. I suppose many scientists want
to code themselves but I can imagine that just as many would rather not
deal with the code if the center's data crunching was really cost
effective compared to traditional approaches and the company knew how
to work with scientists and engineers.
I really hope there is some type of commercial success soon. I'd like to
see Chuck be really well financed by a company with product engineers and
a good marketing department. Chuck could focus on the research (getting
accurate silicon models for deep-submicron, implementing on-chip SRAM,
etc.), and the company could fully develop a product and sell it in the
market. A company like UltraTech could fit in the middle there somewhere,
by porting an OS or development environment, for example. Or do you have
your sights set on a bigger target, Jeff? :)
--
Michael A. Losh Standard disclaimers apply.