PEASE: There's no correlation between getting kids interested in electronics or any other kind of science. I mean computers are simply a way to make the monster kill the young lady, or whatever it is they're doing in today's video games these days, and that's nothing to do with science.
GILBERT: That’s what’s really the key issue here—there is this divide. Earlier, I mentioned the divide between technologies for information processing versus those required for analog, and I believe that there’s a huge distinction between those needs. But in addition to this divide in technologies, there is this division between the world of technology as it impacts us in our daily lives—the microprocessors that are hidden away in the washing machine and that sort of thing, which is not really an exposure at all, because most of us could care less about how a washing machine works—and the people who design those things. In other words, the people who make the microprocessors believe that the next generation of devices—by virtue of this dramatically improved clock cycle speed—is going to do more marvelous things. I suggest sheer speed is a dead end.
Sure, I understand that today’s algorithms are extremely complex, and I frequently wish that I had a machine ten times as fast on which to do my circuit simulations. But that’s not the whole story, it’s only one aspect of the total reality. As long as program developers believe they have power in abundance, to fritter away on a multitude of trivial features—such as Microsoft’s little “HELP” characters—they will gleefully burn-up every last megaflop. For the professional user of a computer in design studies, a re-vectoring of software to run on a thousand little CPUs is a much more promising path to “high speed” from that user’s perspective. It’s not one that’s been neglected entirely. If I want to simulate a very large network, I’d rather have several thousand little processors, each of which knows independently how to behave as, say, a transistor or a resistor or whatever, that are intimately connected together, and communicate asynchronously and essentially concurrently. That’s like the old days of analog computers except, rather than integrators and summers and the like, each element knows the detailed equations of a transistor, and can solve them to 64-bit precision in an instant. This is perfectly possible, but people aren’t doing much about this, because at the moment the market for high-speed simulators is relatively limited to perhaps a few thousand copies. It’s the mass market that always draws the attention.
HOFF: I think it's a bigger problem—that is, the general-purpose relatively ordinary computer has been driven down in cost so much that it's hard for someone like yourself to justify even the development of the kind of combination of processors that you just described. It takes people like you with sufficient motivation and funds to develop something like that. Once you have it, probably other people will find uses for it.
PEASE: I recently ran into a very good quote. It said when you're trying to plow a field, would you rather have two oxen or one-thousand chickens? I'd rather have a breadboard because I can make a microprocessor, an analog microprocessor. I can use a thousand transistors to emulate one thousand transistors, and I know how to make it work at true scale speeds despite capacitance strays. And it ain't easy, but it's an interesting way to go it because sometimes it helps you avoid the stupid problems that Spice gets you into.
GILBERT: We won't talk about that.
HOFF: We won't?
PEASE: I just did, sorry.