On 22 Dec 2010 at 13:15, Shoppa, Tim wrote:
Personally I always thought the i860 was far from a
stumble, because
in fact it was the highest MFlops/dollar and MFlops/watt for a
considerable length of time and used in a number of high-horsepower
applications in the real world.
Don't get me wrong--I thought the i860 was remarkable from an
architectural standpoint and familiar stomping ground for an old
supercomputer guy. But Intel just had no idea of how to market it.
Himself BillG even gave it some happy words (but then, what products
of Intel didn't he give happy words to?).
Farms/clusters weren't awful novel, scientists had
been assembling
their own for a decade before. Intel seeing that it could
commercialize a massively parallel computer, yes in some people's eyes
that would make it legit (when somehow it wasn't legit whenever anyone
did it in the decades before...?)
I can't remember who I first heard it from (Neil Lincoln or Nix
Frazier, perhaps) to the effect that massively parallel computing was
like trying to take nine women and get a baby in one month.
I view the Paragon as being in the same category as the Sequent boxes
of about the same timeframe. Nice for a collector to own, and not
requiring its own HVAC or chilled-water supply and still within the
range of residential electrical service capabilities.
--Chuck