[HN Gopher] Control Data Corporation's CDC 6600
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Control Data Corporation's CDC 6600
Author : brian_herman
Score : 28 points
Date : 2024-04-01 18:29 UTC (4 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (chipsandcheese.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (chipsandcheese.com)
| 082349872349872 wrote:
| One of the 6600 designers said:
|
| > _I suppose the picture of computing is of a topsy-turvy growth
| obeying laws of a commercial "natural" selection. This could be
| entirely accurate considering how fast it has grown. Things
| started out in a scholarly vein, but the rush of commerce hasn't
| allowed much time to think where we're going._ -- JET
|
| I was amazed to read some of what he wrote at the time about the
| 6600 design and consider how qualitatively modern it sounds (if
| one is willing to add zeros and change units where quantitatively
| needed).
| Animats wrote:
| The CDC 6600 was really a rather simple machine; it just had
| multiple copies of some units. The CRAY-I was even simpler, but
| had 64 copies of some units. Both were designed by small teams
| and had simple instruction sets.
|
| The other extreme was the Pentium Pro, the first superscalar
| x86 CPU. I went to the talk at Stanford where the lead designer
| described the architecture. That was the most insanely
| complicated CPU built up to that time. People were thinking
| RISC was the future, because nobody could possibly get
| something as messy as x86 to go much faster by architectural
| means. But Intel brought it off.
|
| One of the speaker's graphs showed the number of engineers
| involved over time. That peaked around 3000 people. Just
| getting that many people to work together to design one
| tightly-coordinated thing was an impressive achievement.
| rbanffy wrote:
| > That peaked around 3000 people.
|
| The number directly from the Pentium team was 3000.0000000001
| people at the highest point.
| _a_a_a_ wrote:
| > The CDC 6600 was really a rather simple machine; ... The
| CRAY-I was even simpler
|
| Pretty bold claim, can you explain why you believe this is
| so?
|
| > But Intel brought it off.
|
| Not by buying up and killing the Alpha AXP, oh no.
| B1FF_PSUVM wrote:
| The DEC Alpha was the swan song of Digital Equipment
| Corporation, which was bought by Compaq (a PC manufacturer
| that peaked in the 1990s), which was bought by HP.
|
| Intel had little to do with it.
| pdw wrote:
| I don't know the details, but from Wikipedia: "In May
| 1997, DEC sued Intel for allegedly infringing on its
| Alpha patents in designing the original Pentium, Pentium
| Pro, and Pentium II chips. As part of a settlement, much
| of DEC's chip design and fabrication business was sold to
| Intel."
| snakeyjake wrote:
| Perhaps one day the power of the CDC 6600 will be available to
| all who need, or merely want, it.
|
| One can dream...
| uticus wrote:
| > Delivering precise exceptions that the operating system can
| resume from would be a ludicrous waste of precious logic.
| Instead, programmers should be honest about the storage their
| programs need, and get good at their job.
|
| ah the days of yore
| ok123456 wrote:
| http://www.bitsavers.org/pdf/cdc/cyber/books/DesignOfAComput...
| jandrese wrote:
| I liked the chart comparing the memory bandwidth against a modern
| video card, which of course had to be in log scale and was still
| enormously different.
| monocasa wrote:
| I know it's an Apr1 post, but I'd honestly really like more
| historic supercomputer content from chipsandcheese; this was a
| great read.
| nxobject wrote:
| A classic early example of superscalar execution.
| johnklos wrote:
| April Fools or not, this is a wonderful writeup that makes for a
| wonderful contrast between historical computing and modern
| computing. Love it!
| rhelz wrote:
| _chuckle_ I got a chance to tour a CDC Cyber 205--one of the last
| in active use. And "tour" is the right word--we toured it like
| you'd tour a house. First and last computer I was ever...inside
| of.
|
| You'd go down this "hall", the walls full of millions of wires,
| carefully looped so that the signals wouldn't arrive too early (1
| foot = 1 nanosecond, and you wanted all the signals of the bus to
| arrive at the same time, which meant the all the wires on the bus
| had to be the same length.) "There's the address bus, now down
| the hall there are two rooms, one is the ALU, the other is the
| optional square root calculating units....
|
| Yeah, a whole "room" to calculate square roots. I guess they
| hadn't figured out the fast square root algorithm which DOOM used
| yet :-)
|
| Absolutely astounding artifact. It was like seeing the great
| pyramids.
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