4 ms·
1M ... 1,000,000 Powers of 10 ... 10 fingers on the ape-man. Such a weird non computing number to be thrilled with. I'm always suspicious when numbers fit int
by monk_e_boy 8y ago
1M ... 1,000,000
Powers of 10 ... 10 fingers on the ape-man. Such a weird non computing number to be thrilled with.
I'm always suspicious when numbers fit into powers of ten like that. Like, somewhere in that build process the person who holds the purse strings doesn't know binary.
- SketchySeaBeast 8y agoWouldn't any number you were going to stop at be arbitrary? If you can fit 1,000 to a rack, you're going to end up with a multiple of ten by the time they are done. These processors don't need to adhere to 2^X, do they?
- monk_e_boy 8y agoI put 1024 in my rack. Why did you choose 1,000?
- SketchySeaBeast 8y agoTotally arbitrary, as is my point.
- vntok 8y agoWhy did you choose 1024?
- strainer 8y agoIts a nice fit for 10 bits
- bencollier49 8y agoBrilliant
- detaro 8y agoIt doesn't actually have exactly 1M processors.
- dkfellows 8y agoIt theoretically has 1036800 processors. It doesn't actually have that many because core-level manufacturing yields aren't 100%. The software architecture is designed to be resilient to this.
- dkfellows 8y agoThe million was a figure chosen to be eye-catching to funders and to force the initial design team to address scalability from the beginning, according to Steve Furber. So yes, it's a bit arbitrary. The actual figure is (for technical reasons) a multiple of 2592. Those technical reasons? That's the topological tiling unit used in the overall toroidal mesh (48 chips per board, arranged to tile in groups of three boards, all times 18 which is the number of cores per chip; 1 OS core, 16 application cores, and 1 bonus that is sometimes available and sometimes not, in order to keep overall chip yields sufficiently high).