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From: quadibloc <quadibloc@gmail.com>
Newsgroups: comp.arch
Subject: Re: The Seymour Cray Era of Supercomputers
Date: Mon, 19 May 2025 03:12:12 +0000
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On Mon, 19 May 2025 1:56:50 +0000, Lawrence D'Oliveiro wrote:

> On Mon, 19 May 2025 01:08:11 +0000, quadibloc wrote:
>
>> Yes, but the CDC 6600 and 7600, while powerful computers, were ordinary
>> computers. They were not vector machines.
>
> They were pipelined machines. They were orders of magnitude faster than
> anything from IBM. They pioneered the very concept of a “supercomputer”.
>
> There was nothing “ordinary” about that.

Yes, that is a fair comment. Eventually, IBM caught up with the Control
Data 6600 by perfecting pipelining in the IBM 360/91, and then combining
it with cache in the 360/195. From the Pentium II onwards, that's the
way computers are made nowadays.

I didn't mean to belittle the 6600, but simply to note that it lacked
the additional speedup that you get from having a vector machine.
Whereas the STAR-100 and the ASC had the opposite fault: having vectors
was all those machines had going for them, while their scalar portions,
unlike that of the 6600, were very definitely ordinary - and so Amdahl's
Law bit them, as I noted.

John Savard