2 Dec
2006
2 Dec
'06
2:17 p.m.
On Tue, 2006-11-28 at 08:35 -0600, Jules Richardson wrote:
Ahh, I was originally asking after systems with
different CPUs though, not
several of the same type - mainly to rule out lots of posts about parallel
machines (as I was curious as to how many manufacturers managed to make a go
of selling 'average' systems with a mixture of CPU types - parallel machines
tend to be in a different league)
Throwing in my two ?re:
The Norsk Data ND-500 and ND-5000 series. The ND-500 CPU was a card rack
to itself, the ND-5000 was crunched together on a VLSI-packed modular
PCB sandwich. The ND-500 ran a very minimal OS called the "Swapper", and
had a microcode which was loaded by the ND-100. The ND-100 ran the OS
(SINTRAN III/VSX) and a lot of applications, while programs written for
the 500 side would be loaded into the dual-ported memory by the 100.
The 5000 was a reimplementation of the 500 into VLSI gate arrays.
http://toresbe.at.ifi.uio.no/nd560-unproc.jpeg
http://toresbe.at.ifi.uio.no/nd/nd-5000/
The latter is a ND-5700 - you can tell by the three layers - with the
cache and some of the decoding/pipelining units, but without the fourth
layer, the IDAC, AKA the "Booster". (a single board which covered most
of the third layer. Added cache and handled in hardware certain
addressing modes that the 5700 and below handled in microcode)
-Tore
