Mini Map Array Processor - What in tarnation?

[William Donzelli]

Yes, the CSPI box is mounted inside a standard DEC cabinet. I have one of
these things in a VAX, originally part of some sort of chemical analysis
tool.

--
Will
On Apr 26, 2016 9:44 PM, "Jon Elson" <elson at pico-systems.com> wrote:

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