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At 01:05 PM 9/12/2002 -0400, Adam Turoff wrote:
>Everyone knows that
>special purpose hardware can easily get an order of magnitude
>performance increase over general purpose computers. It doesn't
>matter what performance metric you use -- MIPS/pound, TB/liter or
>GFLOPS/watt -- the special purpose hardware *always* offers better
>performance.
Yes and no.
It certainly can in the first generation of that hardware, if it is
developed quickly enough. One problem with dedicated relational database
hardware was that the overwhelming demand for more speed in general purpose
hardware means that even if you develop a special purpose machine that's 4
times faster than a normal computer, it won't be once normal computers get
4 times faster. And it's hard for a special-purpose machine to have the
same amount of money for new development as the chip manufacturers.
Intel had more development money than Britton-Lee.
Jonathan
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