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Re: three computing drawbacks

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>>>>> "GM" == George Mpouras <nospam.gravitalsun.noadsplease@hotmail.noads.com> writes:

  GM> Not exactly a perl thread. Here are the three drawbacks (I think)
  GM> that have kept computing back

  GM> 1) Binary system. For digital processors should be three or four
  GM> states so with the same hardware everything would be four times
  GM> faster.

been tried. some old russian system had 3 voltage states. much harder to
create in general and likely almost impossible on the scale of todays
chips. having a transistor go all the way on or off is easy. having a
circuit to check the level of voltage accurate is much more
complex. also the logic tables are not easily coded for. what are the
'tri-boolean' function results? also you don't get speedup, you gain
'density' but density is very very cheap now.

  GM> 2) Bytes should have arbitrary length of “tribits” or “tetrabits
  GM> (Unicode is a definition because of the fixed 8bit bytes)

already done. see PDP-10/decsystem 10 or 20. so unusable that a c
compiler on a dec 20 i used had to put each char in a 36 bit word. bytes
are any size you want on that cpu and sequential access support is built
in. random access is very tricky and slow as code has to do it.

  GM> 3) Clocks. Everything should be absolute asynchronous so the
  GM> chips/electronic would utilized only when needed. Less energy
  GM> greedy and faster

also done already. it is a known thing that async hw will be faster and
use lower power. the problem is with design. sync systems are easier to
design with everything being latched at one time. you can isolate
sections and such. an async chip is much harder to design and it still
needs sync parts to connect to the outside world.

any other 'new' ideas that are actually very old?? :)

thanx,

uri

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three computing drawbacks George Mpouras <nospam.gravitalsun.noadsplease@hotmail.noads.com> - 2013-07-22 09:26 +0300
  Re: three computing drawbacks Uri Guttman <uri@stemsystems.com> - 2013-07-22 03:54 -0400
    Re: three computing drawbacks Shmuel (Seymour J.) Metz <spamtrap@library.lspace.org.invalid> - 2013-07-23 08:39 -0400
    Re: three computing drawbacks "George Mpouras" <nospam.gravitalsun.antispam@spamno.hotmail.anispam.com.nospam> - 2013-07-24 02:06 +0300
      Re: three computing drawbacks Shmuel (Seymour J.) Metz <spamtrap@library.lspace.org.invalid> - 2013-07-24 09:31 -0400
  Re: three computing drawbacks Shmuel (Seymour J.) Metz <spamtrap@library.lspace.org.invalid> - 2013-07-23 08:32 -0400
    Re: three computing drawbacks "Peter J. Holzer" <hjp-usenet3@hjp.at> - 2013-07-23 18:33 +0200
      Re: three computing drawbacks Shmuel (Seymour J.) Metz <spamtrap@library.lspace.org.invalid> - 2013-07-23 17:43 -0400
        Re: three computing drawbacks "George Mpouras" <nospam.gravitalsun.antispam@spamno.hotmail.anispam.com.nospam> - 2013-07-26 23:14 +0300
          Re: three computing drawbacks Charlton Wilbur <cwilbur@chromatico.net> - 2013-07-26 17:23 -0400
            Re: three computing drawbacks "George Mpouras" <nospam.gravitalsun.antispam@spamno.hotmail.anispam.com.nospam> - 2013-07-27 01:21 +0300
              Re: three computing drawbacks Jim Gibson <jimsgibson@gmail.com> - 2013-07-26 17:13 -0700
              Re: three computing drawbacks Scott Bryce <sbryce@scottbryce.com> - 2013-07-27 08:57 -0600
              Re: three computing drawbacks Charlton Wilbur <cwilbur@chromatico.net> - 2013-07-27 18:59 -0400
                Re: three computing drawbacks Ben Morrow <ben@morrow.me.uk> - 2013-07-28 03:54 +0100
              Re: three computing drawbacks Shmuel (Seymour J.) Metz <spamtrap@library.lspace.org.invalid> - 2013-07-28 09:41 -0400
          Re: three computing drawbacks Shmuel (Seymour J.) Metz <spamtrap@library.lspace.org.invalid> - 2013-07-28 13:15 -0400

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