the 8087 co-processor<\/a>. It only cost a couple hundred more dollars. Uh, well that increased the cost of the computer 10% or 20% or something.<\/p>\n\n\n\nTen years later, I was writing software in the C programming language to process images. It was the kind of things that Photoshop did. There were several companies producing co-processing boards to pop into the IBM PC and the clones of the time. The co-processing boards cost several thousand dollars, but if you wanted to really do amazing things, you spent the money.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Well, I didn’t have the money and I wanted to really do amazing things. Solution? I figured real hard and used integers to do everything. I took great pride in telling people that my software removed the need for these extra processing boards. And this all worked. It actually did.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Spend money on hardware? Spend money on brain power? The question never leaves us. We are still trying to decide if we use super-large language models or think a while and use smaller language models. Do we have the hardware to do what we want? Can we afford that? Maybe we should just think more. Same questions.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The answer? Oh, I am sure someone has modeled this question and can show curves of hardware and time and brainpower and all that. They have the universal answer. Did they run simulations on state-of-the-art hardware or think about it a lot? Oh, same questions. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
by Dwayne Phillips The most important computer processor ever made was the Intel 8087 (well, a little exaggeration). Spend more money on hardware or more money on smarts? The decision is still with us. It was 1980. Intel had just released the 8086 CPU\u2014a computer on a chip that worked on 16 bits at a […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[83,48,53,337,3,50],"tags":[200,170,174,338,126,172],"class_list":["post-4200","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-computing","category-general-systems-thinking","category-problems","category-solutions","category-technology","category-thinking","tag-computing","tag-general-systems-thinking","tag-problems","tag-solutions","tag-technology","tag-thinking"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/dwaynephillips.net\/workingup\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4200","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/dwaynephillips.net\/workingup\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/dwaynephillips.net\/workingup\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dwaynephillips.net\/workingup\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dwaynephillips.net\/workingup\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4200"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/dwaynephillips.net\/workingup\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4200\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4201,"href":"https:\/\/dwaynephillips.net\/workingup\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4200\/revisions\/4201"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/dwaynephillips.net\/workingup\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4200"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dwaynephillips.net\/workingup\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4200"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dwaynephillips.net\/workingup\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4200"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}