The Emulator
Sun Microsystems
Menlo Park, CA 2007
Menlo Park, CA 2007
The Emulator is an awesome example of a mechanically complicated Rolling Ball Sculpture. It was designed to compare two different microprocessor technologies. The first being a traditional microprocessor in which only one command line can be processed at a time. The second being a microprocessor with four layers, allowing multiple operations to be processed in a single chip at the same time.
To achieve this, I created a sculpture that has two sides, one for each processor. To see the advantages of the layered processor, one end of the display case has two spiraling tracks that are mirrior images of each other. This allows you to view both sculptures simultaneously and compare the "throughput" of each side. It becomes obvious that the multi-layered processor side is fully active at all times, while the traditional processor starts and stops constantly.
|
|