On 2/11/07, M. Edward (Ed) Borasky <znmeb / cesmail.net> wrote:
 >
> 1. I've been here before -- at the point where general-purpose SISD
> architectures ran out of steam and special-purpose machines abounded. I
> spent ten years working for a company, Floating Point Systems, that
> *made* special-purpose machines. There's a whole generation of people
> out there, myself among them, that ended up finding other things to do
> when the general-purpose SISD (and *CISC*) machine known as the Pentium
> essentially wiped everything else off the map. So I view the current
> "trend" to multicore systems and more dreams of massively parallel
> computers becoming mainstream as only a temporary thing ... a swing of a
> pendulum to one extreme ... general purpose SISD machines will be back!


Are you expecting another round (or more) of massive improvements in
uniprocessor performance?