Newsgroups: comp.parallel
From: alberto@moreira.MV.COM (Alberto C Moreira)
Subject: Re: Massively Parallel "Pizza Box" really the ICE box
Organization: MV Communications, Inc.
Date: 11 Sep 1995 15:30:31 GMT
Message-ID: <431kmn$2j9@usenet.srv.cis.pitt.edu>

In article <42hnis$7gi@usenet.srv.cis.pitt.edu> eugene@pioneer.arc.nasa.gov (Eugene N. Miya) writes:

>>>This article describes the Desktop RealTime Engine rolled out on May 15 by 
>>>Integrated Computing Engines of Cambridge, Mass., a MIT spinoff company.

>Actually MIT Lincoln Labs.  Not quite the same.
 
      Lincoln Labs developed the SHARC chip together with Analog Devices. 
      Analog Devices produces and markets the chip. Integrated Computing
      Engines developed and markets the PC boards. 

>In article <40hhs3$246@shell2.best.com> rcarter@best.com (Russell Carter) writes:
>>This price is ridiculous.  O(1) KFLOPS/$ is the best you can do, I'm sorry
>>that your benchmarks lead you astray, perhaps memory bandwidth wasn't 
>>considered?  Try $300/Mflop for an excellent goal.  Prove me wrong!

>I have to agree with Russell on this one.

       The chip clocks at 40Mhz: 40 megaflops at one operation per cycle. 
       ONE chip, mind you, not a SIMD array of them.
       Your price range means 300x 40 = $12,000 for one chip. But 
        ICE sells 32 chips for 50 grand, say 48, which is $1,500 
        per chip. And that's the very first ramp-up. Just give it time...

>ICE was at SIGGRAPH with a little "demo model."  Read: MODEL.
>ICE has not run the NAS parallel benchmarks and its not clear to me
>whether they will. 

       There's more in the world than running Fortran benchmarks. Just give
       people time. The SHARC is the first glimpse of a very promising road.
       Note that the processor is relatively small, most of the chip is taken 
       by memory. A SHARC with less memory would fit in a much cheaper
       package, and the cost would come tumbling down. Maybe it wouldn't
       do grand challenge problems, but if I could have a board like that for
       a couple of grand or so, I bet I'd find lots of applications in the 
       commercial arena - where the real money is!

[the rest deleted...]

                                                                    
                                                              _alberto_

