Comment Re:Funny I was just thinking that... (Score 1) 43
Ah, the Transputer, legendary money sink for many a company and a government or two.
Demand is relative. Volume is concentrated in uniprocessor low-end boxes: demand with a capital D. Makes sense to throw R&D money there.
Projections for these umpteen-way SMP and switched systems claim the big market is in "servers". I really don't see where servers need to be so tightly (and expensively) coupled vs 100BaseT or something. 'cause the SMP stuff starts needing fire-breathing PCI-X and beyond I/O bus(es!) to feed it and hot-swap cards and redundant power supplies. These are all expensive items!
One can set up a loose cluster server where one box can be smashed to bits and the others carry on transparently. Just plain, simple $500 specials. Maybe SMP is good for other things, but the marketing announcements always say "servers", not ray tracing or particle physics. If the "server" part is factored out, I wonder what the demand really is.
Making an affordable consumer 4-way or 8-way SMP box would be tough. The whole thrust of mass user PCs has been getting rid of those glue chips, those card slots, those cables.
There are other (tightly-coupled) ways to handle more than one instruction stream at once than wiring discrete CPUs with gruesome $$$ bus systems and arbitration logic.
Demand is relative. Volume is concentrated in uniprocessor low-end boxes: demand with a capital D. Makes sense to throw R&D money there.
Projections for these umpteen-way SMP and switched systems claim the big market is in "servers". I really don't see where servers need to be so tightly (and expensively) coupled vs 100BaseT or something. 'cause the SMP stuff starts needing fire-breathing PCI-X and beyond I/O bus(es!) to feed it and hot-swap cards and redundant power supplies. These are all expensive items!
One can set up a loose cluster server where one box can be smashed to bits and the others carry on transparently. Just plain, simple $500 specials. Maybe SMP is good for other things, but the marketing announcements always say "servers", not ray tracing or particle physics. If the "server" part is factored out, I wonder what the demand really is.
Making an affordable consumer 4-way or 8-way SMP box would be tough. The whole thrust of mass user PCs has been getting rid of those glue chips, those card slots, those cables.
There are other (tightly-coupled) ways to handle more than one instruction stream at once than wiring discrete CPUs with gruesome $$$ bus systems and arbitration logic.
