In comp.sys.ibm.pc.hardware.chips Robert Myers <rbmyersusa@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
> wrote
in part:
> To turn your argument over, if latency were king, Intel would be
> out of business and/or have changed tactics drastically. Intel has
> taken its own sweet time about moving away from its traditional
> memory architecture and seems to be doing quite nicely.
Your argument assumes Intel and AMD are identicial with respect
to market success. They are NOT! Intel is much larger and can
afford many mistakes. AMD's production capacity is too small to
be any sort of real threat, at least in the short and medium term.
> That's a one-time gain that has been known to be available at
> least since the last editions of alpha.
Sure. But why not grab it?
> For latency, there is nowhere left to go in terms of
> completely unpredictable reads from memory (or disk).
Sure there is -- SRAM and other designs which take more xtors
per cell. With the continually decreasing marginal cost
of xtors and a shortage of useful things to do with them,
I expect this transition to happen at some point.
> All the tactics that work (prefetch, hide, cache) depend
> on the ability to foresee the future, another hobby horse
> of mine. Terje might claim that improvements come from
> cache management. Improvements in cache management come
> from more successfully exploiting nonrandomness; that is
> to say, the ability to predict the future.
I agree with Terje and those things can be done in
addition to debottlenecking the circuit response.
-- Robert
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