> The market is limited; few people need the additional performance badly enough
> to put up with the cost and configuration hassles
Video cards, sound cards, DSP chipsets, ... . Some do find it useful to speed up software by means of custom hardware, and are willing to pay for it. Of course, that by itself is no guarantee of financial success for companies supplying such hardware. As for configuration hassles, well, a cynic would say that's what generic PCs are all about.
> Given the limited money available to support the development, you'll probably never
> be able to keep up in the throughput technology curve with the general-purpose,
> mass-market processors.
Money is always limited, which is precisely why people must always ask what is the correct way to do things. I would frame the following general question: Where, disregarding historical accidents and existing market factors, is the line properly drawn between hardware and software?
> Eventually (and probably SOON) your balls-out high-speed
> specialized custom processor will be blown away by a simple interpreter running on
> cheap generic iron.
True, if it is not on the Intel learning curve. I'm sure a present day "Winvideo" display running off one of today's Intel CPUs would outrun the best video card on the market of 5 years ago. But speed isn't my main issue (read on).
> If you go back about 7-8 years there was a lot of press about how Sun's revolutionary
> SPARC RISC processor was going to put the Intel-family CISC processors out of
> business, and redefine the PC. It hasn't really happened that way, has it?
I won't comment on the RISC/CISC wars---not smart enough---but I think your point is that the chip fab technology is capital-intensive, that Intel has the most capital, and therefore nobody but Intel could succeed at it today. I somewhat forlornly agree (and would hope to be shown wrong). This is the money issue again.
It's understandable why Intel chose the 4004/8008 CPU model over something like the Burroughs B5500/B6700 model in the year 197X---it wasn't possible to put a mainframe CPU on a controller chip then. Today, it is. But Intel's subsequent market success has, as you rightly point out, foreclosed all questions similar to these we are dealing with in this discussion for two decades.
> (You will remember that the whole raison d'etre of RISC was that by designing a brain-
> damaged processor with a crippled primitive instruction set, they could turn the crank
> faster...)
To me, it's not so much seeing who's faster as simplifying life by replacing multiple software layers with silicon hardware designs informed by enduring software principles, i. e. HLL hardware. Once it's in silicon, it will be on the same chip-fab curve that the current Intel processors are on (especially if Intel did our hypothetical HLL chip and could make it a market success).
I do share your scepticism about the RISC concept. I was never really convinced that the RISC designs I used to see in Byte magazine articles would be intrinsically better for general purpose computing than, say, the Shannon-encoded stack machine that Tanenbaum (I believe it was) designed, _if_ both were designed as rippin' fast hardware.
