Conference heron::euro_swas_ai

314.0. "Sun futures - Any ideas on how we can use up 3000M?" by ULYSSE::ROACH (TANSTAAFL !) Sun Apr 07 1991 12:26

 

                  I N T E R O F F I C E   M E M O R A N D U M

                                        Date:     06-Apr-1991 08:24pm CET
                                        From:     ORCIUCH
                                                  ORCIUCH@YIPPEE@MRGATE@HUGHI
                                        Dept:      
                                        Tel No:    

TO:  PAT ROACH@VBO


Subject: Sun

From:	AIAG::PUNDIT "ASDS Research, dtn 291-8100  05-Apr-1991 1058"  5-APR-1991 18:03:12.98
To:	info
CC:	@aitclist
Subj:	FWD: Info:  The 3G Machine from Sun

------------------Forwarded item dated 4-APR-1991 07:48:19.56------------------

From:	MARX::EKBERG "There is no great talent w/o a mixture of madness. -Seneca  04-Apr-1991 0744"
To:	@LISTS:GROUPB
CC:	DAVE,JOHNM
Subj:	Info:  The 3G Machine from Sun

From:	VAXWRK::ANNETTE "CIS EIC Proposal Response Center  04-Apr-1991 0648"  4-APR-1991 06:50:50.92
To:	JOHN
CC:	
Subj:	Info: Sun's machine

From:	USEM::USEM::MRGATE::"A1::ALLSCHWANG.JAY"  3-APR-1991 20:10:30.14
To:	@Distribution_List
CC:	
Subj:	The 3G Machine

From:	NAME: JAY ALLSCHWANG                
	FUNC: PKO CLUSTER PERSONNEL           
	TEL: 223-8669                         <ALLSCHWANG.JAY AT A1 at USEM at PKO>
To:	See Below



The Florida SunFlash
                         The 3G Machine
SunFLASH Vol 27 #15					          
March 1991 
----------------------------------------------------------------------------
This article was written for Workstation News by Andreas Bechtolsheim,
vice president of technology at Sun Microsystems.  He designed the
original Sun workstation, the SPARCstation, and many other 
systems. It is reproduced with permisssion. -johnj
----------------------------------------------------------------------------
 
			    The 3G Machine
 
			By Andreas Bechtolsheim
			 Sun Microsystems Inc.
 
What is the future of workstation technology? In short: very very
fast.  Those of us in the industry are seeing system performance double
every 12 to 18 months while costs are declining 33% or more at the same
time.  As a result, workstation cost/performance is doubling each
year.  There have been very few things in the history of mankind that
have sustained this particular kind of exponential increase over time.
 
To realize these expectations, RISC architectures are essential; the
older CISC architectures are inadequate.  Why?  CISC is inherently
defined by the personal computer -- a system that is very different
from a workstation in important ways.
 
From a personal computer perspective, the top three requirements for
next-generation CISC chips are binary compatibility, high integration,
and low power.  It is obvious that by 1993, today's personal computer
will be one chip plus memory that fits on a credit card, which plugs
into a portable keyboard/display.  Perhaps it has video and audio as
well, but clearly the big push is for the smallest and lowest-power
implementation that gives standard PC functionality.  There are several
highly integrated chip sets for PC portables available today, and the
future will see a lot more of them.
 
On the workstation front, in comparison, the top four requirements are
performance, performance, performance and performance.  This is due to
the nature of the applications that workstation solve, which are
basically large programs dealing with huge amounts of data in
workgroups involving many users and heavy-duty networking.  Thus the
workstation market places fundamentally different product requirements
on the central processing unit and system design than do traditional
personal computers.
 
This is why all major UNIX workstation vendors have made a transition
to RISC technology.  Since UNIX need not be burdened by binary
compatibility with antiquated instruction sets, system designers
created CPU architectures for UNIX that allow for the highest possible
performance.  Without going into the technical details, the real
driving force for RISC was the ability to cut the ties with the past
and design CPUs architectures that utilize our best theoretical
understanding of how to maximize performance.
 
In practice, this means that RISC offers two to three times the
performance of CISC, assuming the same chip technology, die size, and
so on.  But even more important, RISC chips are being driven to the
highest performance levels on all fronts, since that is what their
application requires.
 
A good example is multiprocessing.  While there are now multiprocessor
chip sets for personal computers, the simple fact is that MS-DOS does
not support it.  On the UNIX side, however, virtually every system
vendor is working on multiprocessing systems that in the near future
will provide total performance levels that are higher than any
general-purpose computer system on the market today.
 
One future concept we are investigating at Sun in this area is called
the 3000M machine --- or the 3G machine, for short.  The early Sun
workstations in 1982 were really "3M machines", they had 1 MIPS of
compute power, 1 Mbyte of memory, and a 1 Mpixel display.  A 3G or
3000M machine would correspondingly provide 1000 MIPS of compute power,
1000 MBytes of memory, and one thousand times the graphics power of the
original 3M machine.  In other words, it's 1000 times as powerful on
all fronts than the first Sun workstation, and more powerful than most
supercomputers on the market today.
 
But this new computer will not require some magical development in
semiconductors or any radical new concepts beyond the logical extension
of next-generation RISC CPU and system design.  Superscalar techniques,
which will soon replace vector processing, will result in effective
clock speeds of well over 100 MHz, and future process technologies will
further increase clock frequencies.  Thus the 3G machine is simply the
natural evolution of innovation and investments that we and others have
made over the last many years.
 
What could you do if you had your personal 3G machine? Truly incredible
kinds of things.  Imagine for a second that you are a genetic scientist
who is deciphering the human DNA code.  As it happens, the human DNA is
about 2^30 genetic codes long, where each genetic code fits into 1 byte
of memory. So you can store the entire DNA in 1 Gbyte of memory and use
the processing power to compare gene sequences along the entire DNA
code in a few seconds.  Or imagine that you are a chip designer who's
trying to simulate a one million-gate chip.  That would be very
difficult to do today on a current workstation.  Not so with a 3G
machine, which performs simulations about 100 times faster and can
store the entire design.  Or imagine that you are an aeronautical
designer who wants to derive the optimal airplane wing shape, factoring
in weight, strength, speed and fuel economy.  Again, this kind of task
is not possible on today's workstations, but quite feasible on a 3G
machine.
 
The common characteristics of these applications are that they deal
with compute-bound, large, complex problems, which are inherent in all
design and engineering activities.  In fact, we see basically all of
engineering move to simulation-based environments, because they will be
more cost effective than traditional laboratory approaches.
 
In summary, I see UNIX workstations as the driving force in
high-performance computing.  There is a literally unsatiable demand out
there for faster and more powerful machines to design better,
higher-quality, and lower-cost products in the shortest possible time.
In the end, this is what will be fueling worldwide innovation for years
to come.
 
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
For information send mail to [email protected].
Subscription requests should be sent to 
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Archives are on solar.nova.edu and paris.cs.miami.edu.
 
All prices, availability, and other statements relating to Sun or third
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Sales Representative for details of pricing and product availability in
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publication by Sun Microsystems.
 
John McLaughlin, SunFlash editor, [email protected]. 
(305) 776-7770.