>10 MHz
>1964
That's insane. What's even more insane is that a bit over 20 years later homecomputers reached that frequency. And in the next decade they reached over 100 MHz. - Pure lunacy.
Posted from my 5 GHz homecomputer.
>1964
That's insane. What's even more insane is that a bit over 20 years later homecomputers reached that frequency. And in the next decade they reached over 100 MHz. - Pure lunacy.
Posted from my 5 GHz homecomputer.
The CDCs still had a good run. This line was originally released in 1964. It started at 10MHz, but that was 60 bit words, and special floating-point systems. IIRC floating-point multiplies were only one clock cycle; if that's correct, it took 100 nanoseconds.
The Apple II came out in 1977, 1MHz, 8 bit CPU and no floating-point circuits. You had to use many cycles to do any floating point, and typically you only used 32-bit floating point (because it was painful enough there). A single 32-bit floating point multiply took 3-4 milliseconds according to: https://books.google.com/books?id=xJnfBwAAQBAJ&pg=PA26&lpg=P...
The original IBM PC came out in 1981. Its clock was 4.77 MHz. But again, that was misleading. Internally the 8086 was a 16-bit CPU but its memory I/O was only 8 bits wide. It didn't normally come with a floating-point processor. There was one, the 8087, and I think the original IBM PC had a socket for it, but it cost big $$$ and the 8087 wasn't actually available for purchase until ~6 months after the PC's release. That one could go 4-10MHz. If you bought a coprocessor, you were finally getting to somewhat similar speeds for numerical calculations... but that was 16+ years later.
Did you mean 8088 here?
A product generation later, Intel changed what this meant to indicate whether or not the CPU had an on-chip FPU.
Those were the days you looked at the TRW multipliers (packed in 64+ pin DIPs) advertised in trade magazines like auto buffs might at V8 engines ...
Intel sold their own 8087, until it was digested into the vast expanses of CPU chips opened by scaling.
CDC-6600, 1964: 60-bit processor @ 10 MHz, 2 MIPS, 1 MFLOPS
CDC-7600, 1967: 60-bit processor @ 36 MHz, 15 MIPS, 36 MFLOPS
Cray-1, 1975: 64-bit processor @ 80 MHz, 80 MIPS, 160 MFLOPS
I think this means that if a corresponding development in video coprocessors had been taking place (there wasn't really a recognized need for them back then, as far as I can tell), the CDC-6600 could have been running Wolfenstein 3D decently well in 1964, 28 years before the launch in 1992.
And the CDC-7600 could have been running DOOM decently well in 1967, 26 years before the launch in 1993.
But it built on the history of “display processors” already in use: http://www.cap-lore.com/Hardware/Wheel.html
I had thought that computers of the time didn't have enough RAM for a framebuffer, but evidently the CDC6600 did, with what we would call 982 kilobytes today.
I mean.. I did see https://www.ftdichip.com/EVE/EVEApplications.htm .. but, in reality?
Are you based out of Taiwan?
You could imagine putting something like a 320×200 CGA on a CDC 6600, taking what we would now call 16000 bytes of memory, at a cost of around US$40 000 in 1965 (https://jcmit.net/memoryprice.htm says). But it seems like it would be hard to justify that as a good alternative to adding those 16000 bytes to the machine's main memory, supplying an extra 1.6% of its address space with storage and allowing it to tackle problems that were, say, 5% larger.
(There may also have been a question of memory speed. The memory cited above that cost US$2.50 a bit was core, and maybe it had a 300 ns cycle time; a 320×200 display at 50 Hz minimally requires a 312.5 ns dot clock, and probably quite a bit faster than that because of the blanking intervals, so you might have needed two to four memory banks just to satisfy the RAMDAC's hunger for pixels. Of course they wouldn't have called it a "RAMDAC" or "dot clock" at the time.)
"On the shoulder of giants" is an old and very true statement.
“Wolfenstein 3D on my basement CDC 6600”
They're topological circuit constructions that work for either family - aren't they?
MOS is just hard. It's hard to fabricate, it's hard to design (i.e. you need computers to make computers!), it's hard to scale. It required new chemistries be invented and new circuit design techniques to manage the (really tiny!) components. So for a long time you could have a big circuit in discrete bipolar components which ran fast or a tiny one in MOS which was slow.
But MOS was tiny and MOS was cheap. So by the early 90's it had caught up in speed with all but the fastest discrete technologies (GaAs was "right around the corner" for like two decades as it kept getting lapped by routine process shrinks -- now no one remembers it) and the market abandoned everything else.
I think the important point is that "MOS scales". All the bipolar technologies never had anything like Dennard scaling, which was the backbone of Moores Law.