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The thread that started off talking about Teraflops processors, (Re: 1teraflops cell processor possible?), which, amongst other stuff, deviated to talking about stream processors (for which I share Robert Myers interest[*]) reminds me to post about a more theoretical topic: Several times I have heard people say "of course, the limit, the ultimate, is processor in memory - if the computation were actually free, it would be done next to the memory containing the data to be operated on". I think this is NOT true. Most computation involves more than one data item. I think this implies that the optimum place to perform a computation will be at something resembling the centroid of the data items involved - weighted by access frequency. With some allowance for treating instructions as data. During the life of a comnputation this "computational centroid" would shift over time. Parallel computations would be performed at something resembling a Viterbi constallation diagram. --- Re streams: would you build a stream instrction set, or a vector instruction set? Obviously, vectors can be built on top of streams. Vice versa is a bit harder.
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