From: tcmay@netcom.com (Timothy C. May)
Date: Thu, 18 Aug 94 23:37:52 PDT
To: ianf@simple.sydney.sgi.com (Ian Farquhar)
Subject: Re: NSA spy machine
In-Reply-To: <9408191544.ZM5510@simple.sydney.sgi.com>
Message-ID: <199408190637.XAA16716@netcom9.netcom.com>
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain


Ian F. writes:

> Secret: take lots and lots and lots of money, use the most exotic packaging
> technologies you can find, pay lots and lots of attention to your memory
> system and cache, don't forget the importance of a nicely balanced
> architecture (meaning that I/O does matter), don't forget the importance of
> good compilers, and implement bit counting instructions just like the NSA
> tells you to.
> 
> Hardly a secret, don't you think?

With no disrepect meant to Ian (indeed, this is my second reply of the
day to him), I think his point is dead wrong.

The "secret" to general success in this market is not "lots and lots
of money," at least not when "lots and lots" is the tens of millions
of dollars that Cray Computer will apparently being getting from NSA
and the Supercomputer folks in Bowie for the delivery of an ostensible
Cray 4 or whatever it ends up being called (SMPP, etc.).

$10 million is pocket change. Anyone building a company on that chump
change is already preparing Chapter 11 papers.

Here's what "lots and lots of money" *really* is:

- $1 billion to complete a wafer fab in Ireland, finished last February

- $1.3 billion to build a wafer fab in Albuquerque, to be finished
later this year

(said to be the most expensive privately funded building in the world)

- $1.3 billion to build essentially a duplicate of the above
facilities, in Chandler, Arizona...construction to start this year

- $2 billion to build yet another wafer fab, in Hillsboro,
Oregon..construction to start in 1995

Intel is already the world's largest chip comany (in _all_ chips, not
just one particular type). If this series of expansions works out (and
the Ireland plant is churning out Pentiums on 200 mm wafers with very
high yields), then Intel will be nearly twice the size of its nearest
competitor. 

Intel Corporation, my employer from 1974 to 1986, may not have the
most elegant architecture in the world, but its microprocessor
fabrication facilities are clearly the best in the world. The
economies of scale are amazing to comtemplate. (And I was near the
group in Oregon that tried "elegance"...the iAPX 432 object-oriented
processor. I only hope the new Intel-H-P alliance on VLIW is not
similarly stillborn.)

(And a new generation of hackers are using Linux on cheap Pentium
boxes to easily outrun Suns.)

Is a massively parallel system of Pentiums or 200 SPECInt P6s or 400
SPECInt P7s the "best" way to go? Given the economies of scale, the
familiarity many people just like you will have with the Pentium, it
probably is.

I'm a fan of the Mac, and may soon be buying a PowerMac, but the
PowerPC does not seem to have the same economies of scale. At least,
Motorola is not expanding rapidly enough to keep up. 

(A hot rumor, to take with some skepticism: a friend of mine told me
tonight that the rumor going around MIPS is that Motorola plans
nothing beyond the 603, that they are fed up with the politics of the
Somerset group (IBM, Motorola, Apple), and that they just don't have
$5 billion laying around to remain competitive with Intel. The rumor
is that they plan to concentrate on telecom, cellular, Iridium, etc.,
and not fight Intel head-on with a come-from-behind architecture.)


So you see why I consider the "lots and lots of money" flowing into
Cray Computer to be spitting into the ocean. I'm not worried.


--Tim May


-- 
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