[Haskell-cafe] Specialized Computer Architecture - A Question

[Brandon Allbery]

On Mon, Mar 18, 2013 at 4:31 PM, OWP <owpmailact at gmail.com> wrote:

> Let me rephrase that, of course they will survive politically.  People
> built these tools and if built, they will be use but will they survive
> efficiently?   In the future, if a particular specialized architecture
> is somewhat better than the rest on it's own merit for a particular
> need while the stock architecture is reaching a
> point of low returns for all the energy put into it - could the
> specialized architecture reach a point where it becomes useful?  Could
> there be a competitive advantage to specialized architecture if
> Moore's Law were to go away?
>

There is now, in some narrow specializations. GPUs and DSP come to mind ---
while both are also done on commodity CPUs to some extent, the specialized
architectures are used where speed is of the essence. (DSP started out on
specialized architectures, but many commodity uses are on commodity
architectures these days, reserving the specialized ones to those niches
that require them.)

-- 
brandon s allbery kf8nh                               sine nomine associates
allbery.b at gmail.com                                  ballbery at sinenomine.net
unix, openafs, kerberos, infrastructure, xmonad        http://sinenomine.net
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