How Smart Can We Afford to be?

Here are some thoughts/questions that have been mulling around in my head
since I took a class last year in "High-performance computer
architecture". Have at them.
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1. What is the rate of speed increase in transistor switching speeds?
2. How long does it take, on average, for a new semiconductor technology to
      make it into a commerical product?
3. What is the difference in time to market of a non-pipelined RISC processor
      with a large, simple on board cache/lots of registers and a heavily
      pipelined, brach prediction, etc. processor?
4. How well do logical level designs for one technology transfer to another?
5. Can "smart" design systems aid the movement of a physical design from one
      technology to another?
6. Can sophisticated optimizing compilers be built correctly in a timely
      fashion?
7. What are the tradeoffs in writing a compiler that takes advantage of
      lots of registers, versus a compiler that does a good job of instruction
      scheduling and taking advantage of a pipeline?
--
Joel Jones, jjones@uiuc.edu
--

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