On 04/26/2016 07:59 PM, Swift Griggs wrote:
Seriously,
http://tinyurl.com/j46jg4p
http://www.computerhistory.org/collections/catalog/102743645
What in the world is this thing? Some kind of early parallel or vector
processor?
We got a CSPI 6410 and had it hooked to a VAX 11/780. It
was probably a bigger brother to the machine you
link to. There was a big math library that came with it.
If you had really regular matrix operations, such as FFTs,
matrix multiplies and similar classic operations, it could
do them quite fast, in the several MFLOP range. The bigger
the matrix (as long as it fit in the memory of the unit) the
better, as the library just set up all the registers, loaded
the data and turned it loose. If you had a bunch of small
matrices, it was a lot less efficient, as it had the same
setup overhead for every task.
Yes, it is a vector processor, with a floating-point
multiplier and adder, some address arithmetic logic and a
sequencer.
Jon
