Mini Map Array Processor - What in tarnation?

[Jon Elson]

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