User:Schol-r-lea/OISC Wars Part 3
N.B.: This is one of a group of forum posts extracted so that the information in them can be re-worked into a less confrontational, more informational set of wiki pages. They are here only temporarily.
While I don't think that OISCs make good general-purpose CPUs, I can see one, or something like one, as the unit of a specialized systolic array that could be used as a signal processor or part of a larger CPU - in other words, as nodes in precisely the sort of DSP or GPU you seem to think are such a bad idea. However, that's a really, really sketchy proposition, and not one I see anyone backing as a production device unless a lot more research and development proves it useful - it isn't really all that different from existing DSPs, so it would need to show some spectacular advantages to make it usable.
One thing I need to impress is that my statements are not about your interest in Subleq based systems itself, but in the claims you are making about them - and the conspiratorial tone you are using when discussing existing systems. I am all for new ideas, but they need a lot of proving and refining before they can be used in a practical setting.
The Subleq instruction, and the proof that it is Turing-complete, dates back to the mid-1960s; don't you think that if it were a viable system, someone would have at least tried to use it in a commercial system by now? I won't say it will never work - I have no idea what may happen in the future - but today it just makes no sense given the technology and the state of our understanding of the idea.
(The one class of OISCs that has been used commercially, in software, is a specialized one for cryptography and cryptanalysis. Interestingly enough, IBM has also sold ZISCs for specialized neural networking projects as well, though apparently they have discontinued them. Even more esoteric computation models such as Petri nets and even Calculus of Indications have also been used; yea, do many things come to pass.)
There is a saying in some engineering disciplines which the WTFers are fond of repeating: any new idea has to be measured not from 0, but from -100 (or lower). This is in part to compensate for the natural enthusiasm that someone working on an idea has, but also to account for the resistance to change which is inherent in most commercial markets. You have to prove not only that the idea is better than the existing one, but that it is dramatically and overwhelmingly better. You have yet to do this so far. Maybe you will some day, but so far, no.
