David Fontaine wrote:
> 
> Thomas Willhalm wrote:
> 
> > Are you sure? The light has a speed of 300.000 km per second. So a signal
> > with the speed of light travels in one cycle of such a processor
> > 3*10^8 / 7.794*10^11 m which makes approximately 0.38 mm. If you assume
> > that a signal should be able to traverse a processor in one cycle, the
> > whole processor must be smaller than 0.38 mm.
> 
> Processors can do more and more per cycle as they evolve, too. So you wouldn't
> actually need an 800Ghz chip.

	All the years of improvement and finally the 100MHz buss appeared, up
from 75. The new 2GHz from Intell will include a 400 MHz buss chipset.
So we get a cylindrical buss like a Cray ... 

	Maybe I am old fashioned but I've always had this idea the CPU and buss
should be the same speed. Fetch ahead is an amusing but uninteresting
hack. 

	But at 2 GHz just what possible reason is there for hardware cards? I
think I can spare 100 Mcycles to emulate them. 

	So I have this 3x3 inch card with a couple gigs of RAM, the CPU and a
couple USB ports. The USB port feed the conversion cards to video,
serial, parallel, keyboard, rat and such. This card plugs into my 100
Gig HD. Most data paths are less than one inch. The longest is from the
CPU to the R/W head on the HD. 

	If I am making my point correctly, we can give up a little of this new
processor speed in exchange for throwing away the buss and all the cards
that now sit on it. 

	The new USB standard is over 400 Mbs. 

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