Speeding Up The Computer

SPEEDING UP THE COMPUTER The architecture of the computer If you look at a modern micro, say, an 80386-based Ism compatible, you will dis- cover that nearly all the memory band- width is used up. If faster memory were installed, it might be possible to increase the speed of the processor by several times, but that would be the limit for that particular architecture. In an earlier article" I mentioned one way out of this dilemma: parallel process- ing. There are, however, many other ways of speeding up appar- ently sequential processors so that they can reach speeds of up to 600 MFlops (million floating point operations per second). At present, the Cray-3 represents the limit of that approach as far as commercial machines go. The Cray-2 is the fastest one that has been commer- cially released. Cacheing Cacheing is one of the simplest techniques that can be used to speed up a computer. Earlier, I mentioned that faster memory could allow the speed of most ma- chines to be increased s...