Can a x86/x64 cpu/memory system be changed into a barrel processor ?

It's not only about "cpu" and "os" as you mention.

It's general system architecture.

Very important numbers like:

ethernet speed, modem speed, harddisk speed, memory speed, pci-express speed, gpu speed, texture speed, triangles speed, pixel processing/shader speed, frames per second speed, compression speed, usb speed, flash speed, cd rom/dvd rom/blue ray speed, floppy disk speed, mouse speed, keyboard speed, editor speed, gui speed, monitor refresh/gdi repainting speed, opengl speed, video codec speed, audio codec speed, Random memory access speed,

Speed, speed, speed, speed, speed, the list goes on and on and on and on.

Under estimate or over estimate any of these speeds which your program might relay on given a certain user situation/scenerion and you are going to find yourself in a whole lot of shit, hoping/wanting that you had designed that software/algorith a little bit better or differently... if only you knew the proper numbers and had considered those and did some basic calculations to see if it was possible or not within some desired time/user scenerio , it takes only one little botlleneck somewhere to fok you up real good ! ;) :) =D

Bye, Skybuck.

Actually "conventional wisdom" in business today is that "first to market" is often far more important than "bug-free and feature-laden." Sadly this is true in many cases, although there are plenty of counter-examples as well: Tablet PCs were largely ignored (even though they'd been around for a decade or so) until Apple introduced the iPad, and now they're the fastest growing segment of PCs.

Again, it really depends on the application. If you're writing a web browser, of the dozen guys you might have on the team doing so, I doubt more than 1 or

2 really need to understand the underlying hardware all that well. Heck, a lot of people -- myself included -- use library files for cross-platform development specifically so that we don't *have* to understand the low-level architecture of every last OS and CPU we're targeting; many applications just don't need every last once of CPU power available.

That's very true.

But look... I grew up with a Commodore 64. It was very cool, and I knew a large fraction of everything there was to know about it, both at the hardware and the software levels. But today's PCs are different -- there's *no one single person at Intel who thoroughly understands every last little technical detail of a modern Pentium CPU*, just as there's *no one single person at Microsoft who thoroughly understands every last little technical detail of Windows*. That's just how it is for desktop PCs -- they're so complex, very few people are going to code at, e.g., the raw assembly level for an entire application (a notable exception might be someone like Steve Gibson -- and even there, his assembly code ends up calling OS routines that were written in C...); might find some comfortable balance between development time and performance.

(One can have that same sort of "Commodore 64" experience today with the myriad of microcontrollers available. Or heck, build your own system-on-chip in an FPGA... cool beans!)

Agreed, although I think you underestimate just how good optimizing compilers are as well -- in many cases they're far better than the average programmer in rearranging code so as to optimize cache access and otherwise prevent pipeline stalls.

Join the crowd. As has been mentioned, Intel and AMD spend many millions of dollars every year simulating all sorts of different CPU architectures in their attempts to improve performance.

---Joel

" Give it up!

Your so far behind the eight ball that you look like a dinosaur. "

Your two sentences mean nothing.

You a little fat bitch trying to look smart.

Go f*ck yourself with your PC case, I am sure it fits by now ! LOL.

Bye, Skybuck.

Oops. Yes. Silly me. Sorry. Too focussed on introspective instruction sequences when all along there was an independent observer next door.

[etc.]

Yeah, I take your point... but I'll also mention that I think the majority of the population these days is perfectly served by a sub-$500 desktop PC or a sub-$750 laptop, even though such machines rank relatively low compared to the "cutting edge" in most of the aspects you mention.

In many home-use scenarios the bottleneck is the speed at which someone can type or mouse or the speed of the Internet.

And even in FPS games, most people are far more limited by their own innate gaming skills than whether their video card is cranking out 30FPS or 60FPS. :-)

---Joel