On Mon, Mar 18, 2013 at 4:31 PM, OWP
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@gmail.com ballbery@sinenomine.net unix, openafs, kerberos, infrastructure, xmonad http://sinenomine.net