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CDC 6600. Pioneer Supercomputer. Control Data Corporation. Started by founding members of another company, Engineering Research Associates CDC started selling parts, primarily drum memory, while designing computer systems. Drum Memory. Designing the 6600. CDC Chief Engineer - Seymour Cray
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CDC 6600 Pioneer Supercomputer
Control Data Corporation • Started by founding members of another company, Engineering Research Associates • CDC started selling parts, primarily drum memory, while designing computer systems
Designing the 6600 • CDC Chief Engineer - Seymour Cray • Design Issues considered • Packaging • Plumbing • Parallelism • Programming • Understanding problems
Performance through Parallelism • Simple CPU supported by array of I/O processors • Many common tasks offloaded • CPU devoted to applying operations to memory, rather than managing memory, disks, or I/O • Result – 6600 outperformed other computers 10 to 1
RISC Processors • 6600 was the first RISC type processor • RISC – Reduced Instruction Set Computer • This type of architecture still popular in performance oriented computing.