CDC 6600
Fastest computer 10/64-69 till 7600 intro
Packaging for 400,000 transistors
Memory 128 K 60-bit words; 2 M words ECS
100 ns. (4 phase clock); 1,000 ns. cycle
Functional Parallelism: I/O adapters, I/O channels, Peripheral Processing Units, Load/store units, memory, function units, ECS- Extended Core Storage
10 PPUs and introduced multi-threading
10 Functional units control by scoreboard
No paging/segmentation… base & bounds
Notes:
This summarizes the 6600s contribution. It began to establish the supercomputer class by being larger, faster, and more parallel than any other computer of the day. The 6600 has to be compared with IBM’s System/360 series.
By being larger than all of the other computers of the day it pushed the limits of reliability. Cray’s supposed comment: “Parity is for farmers” related to the 6600 that had no parity.
It introduced the concept of a random access memory hierarchy that was under program control.
It was the first computer to use Multi-Threading. The Multi-Threading Architecture is one candidate for future computers to deal with the memory latency problem.
It was the archetype for RISC.