discrete transistors

From: Eric Smith <eric_at_brouhaha.com>
Date: Mon Oct 19 18:03:27 1998

I wrote:
> < can not compete with a high-end monolithic microprocessor. The laws of
> < physics conspire against it.

Allison J Parent replied:
> They do. There are ways around that. Tricks like massively parallel or
> very wide words to name a few.

And none of those tricks scale up very well for implementing high-performance
versions of standard microprocessor architectures. The point was that
it is impossible to build a discrete-transistor x86 to outperform (or even
match the performance of) the Pentium II. You could build some sort of
non-x86 discrete transistor to outperform the PII on specialized tasks, but
that's a different matter entirely.

Eric
Received on Mon Oct 19 1998 - 18:03:27 BST