IMO, the reason that Turing machines are so cool is that they allow
one piece of hardware to perform arbitrary calculation tasks
with just software modifications. This means that you can avoid
R&D costs on special-purpose chips, gain economies of scale, and
avoid distribution costs and checks for availability of special
hardware. In my ideal (theoretical) world, there wouldn't be
hardware modems, 3D accelerators, etc. Obviously in real life
certain DSPs (e.g. 3D chips) proliferate enough and are a large
enough performance gain to make special purpose hardware worthwile,
but that's IMO the special case. The extreme of having no
general CPU but rather special purpose word processor, spreadsheet,
mp3, etc. chips is obviously not the way to go. With the relatively
low computation costs of modems I don't find it surprising at all
that doing things in software is often a win, especially when you
consider that most consumer's CPUs are over 90% idle more than 90% of
the time.
Sumner
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