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?