Seymour Cray's super computers

Content:

Original link: CDC and Seymour Cray's Fever Dreams / Marko Tahvanainen / LinkedIn.

The man was brilliant. He was the man behind CDC 6600 (worlds fastest 1964-69), CDC 7600 (worlds fastest 1969-74), Cray-1 (worlds fastest 1976-1980) and Cray-2 (worlds fastest 1985-88).

This article explains some of the unique hardware decisions made to facilitate this success.

It is worth noting that the original CDC 6600 ISA (emulated in CDC 7600) was also rather unique:

  1. 60 bit integers in one's complement (both +0 and -0)
  2. 60 and 120 bit floating point
  3. 6 bit bytes
  4. 18 bit word addressing ~ 262144 words of 60 bit (=2621440 bytes of 6 bit)
(yes - I have used one!)

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