17 Jan
2006
17 Jan
'06
4:10 p.m.
On 1/17/2006 at 2:33 PM Billy Pettit wrote:
Halt and Catch fire was a joke. I never heard of 7600
catching fire. We
had a chassis melt once, when the refrigeration stopped and the fail safes
all failed. But no fires.
No, but programmers were warned that very tight (one instruction) loops on
the 7600 PPU's could precipitate parity errors. IIRC, each PPU had the
27.5 nsec core in a 2-way interleave. For the time, 27.5 nsec was very
fast core and the interleave pretty much guaranteed a maximum duty cycle.
Contrast with the 6600 that used, what, 1 usec core?
At least that's my recollection. A parity error is about as close as you
can get to catching fire. I've seen jammed 512 printers that smelled like
they were about to catch fire, however.
Cheers,
Chuck