Re: Is it time to stop research in Computer Architecture ?

nmm1@xxxxxxxxx wrote:
Printing in China has been used for about a 1000 years when movable types
where invented there - and that invention didn't catch on. It was easy
enough to carve the writing into stone or wood and print that way, movable
types are only cost effective if you print in low volume.

That's not true. The converse is. Carving a whole block in reverse
and printing from that is only cost-effective if the number of pages
printed is small.

You need to get that equation right: The initial setup cost of carving a
whole block is high, so it is cost-effective if the number of pages printed
with one carved block is also high. You have to print the same page quite
often to amortize the carving, but it doesn't matter if you do so with just
a few pages, or with many pages - as long as you are able to sell the whole
book in 10k units, carving is worth the effort. Movable types don't last as
long as carved blocks. Movable types finally were accepted in China and
surrounded nations when metallurgy had advanced sufficiently to make the
movable types last long enough to print even high-volume books.

You need extremely skilled people to carve them,
in order to keep the error rate down. There are also problems with
movable type and Chinese characters (i.e. the number of them!)

This is actually not a big problem, since when you are seriously printing,
you need a lot of characters anyways (not just so many different ones), and
the statistics of Chinese characters means that you have at least an 80/20
rule (>80% of the text uses less than 20% of the available characters, and
there's a significant number of high-runners).

And the error rate is not so much a problem: Chinese characters are
sufficiently redundant.

Before moveable type, almost all printing was things like pictures,
prayers, fabric patterns and other uses where the number of different
pages is small.

You are obviously not aware of what kind of books were printed in classical
China. Granted, many books had about half of the space devoted to pictures
(it's a "because we can" attitude). But a lot of books had many pages,
despite the fact that Chinese texts are much denser than texts in western
languages. Having a much larger market to sell the books to (more
population, more literacy, same written language everywhere) made it easier
to amortize printing with carved blocks.

--
Bernd Paysan
"If you want it done right, you have to do it yourself"
http://www.jwdt.com/~paysan/
.

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