Any interest in a Floating Point Systems AP-120 array processor?

[Zane Healy]

> On Mar 2, 2021, at 4:06 AM, Peter Corlett via cctalk <cctalk at classiccmp.org> wrote:
> 
> On Mon, Mar 01, 2021 at 10:40:41PM -0800, Boris Gimbarzevsky via cctalk wrote:
> [...]
>> Out of curiousity, decided to benchmark one of my old, really cheap PC
>> laptops that got in 2010 and it managed 30 Mflops using double precision
>> arithmetic. 10 Mflop performance no longer as impressive as it used to be.
> 
> I'll say. Modern kit gets 1 FLOPS per MHz per core, give or take an order of
> magnitude depending on the specific architecture. That machine must have
> been appallingly bad to only manage 30 MFLOPS. Although perhaps you meant
> GFLOPS, in which case it sounds about right.
> 
> The Haswell CPU in my 2014-vintage laptop manages "up to" 147 GFLOPS. Which
> is an order of magnitude slower than its GPU. Useful FLOPS for scientific
> computing rather than contrived numbers for benchmarking may well lose an
> order of magnitude or two in overhead, but it's still not hanging about.

If I remember correctly the Apple PowerMac G4 was touted as the first Consumer system capable of GFLOPS.  The G4/450 when released, was an amazing system, but it was very quickly left in the dust.

Floating Point Systems was a few miles away from where I live.  A couple weeks ago, we drove by there, and I noticed that at least the main office building is still there.  I used to work with a couple of people that had worked there.  Years ago I found one of the Array Processors at Wacky Willies, I didn’t get it, but I did get the PDP-11/44 manual that was with it.  I think I might have a VAX tape around here for one of their Array Processors.

Zane