About Cray-1A

nonnno

Hi　All
I watched "Homebrew Cray-1A" in the next site.
As for me, it "is Propeller Chip" - I connect 44-Pin QFP Chip to a plural number and can make the thing which is equal to "Homebrew Cray-1A?"
Yours sincerely,
KYOJI

http://chrisfenton.com/homebrew-cray-1a/

Humanoido

nonnno wrote: »

Hi　All I watched "Homebrew Cray-1A" in the next site. As for me, it "is Propeller Chip" - I connect 44-Pin QFP Chip to a plural number and can make the thing which is equal to "Homebrew Cray-1A?"
Yours sincerely, KYOJI http://chrisfenton.com/homebrew-cray-1a/

Kyoji, you can check this link for a prop based super computing machine. The UltraSpark 40 is a 6,400 MIPS machine.

http://forums.parallax.com/showthread.php?t=123828

It is not difficult to match the computing power of a Cray-1 using a few Propeller chips, and there are several threads discussing it in detail.

Humanoido

ericball

The Cray-1 had 3 independent pipelined floating point functional units which could be chained together and 5 kilobytes of register storage (total). So once those vector registers got loaded it was possible (in theory) for it to hit 240MFLOPS with an 80MHz system clock. (It also had 7 integer functional units, so wasn't a slouch on MIPS either.)

So while it might be possible to emulate the Cray-1 with a Propeller or to duplicate the performance given enough chips the two are very different architecturally.

The Cray-1 was a monster vector processor (for it's time), which is a form of SIMD, while the Propeller is a true multiprocessor (MIMD) but it lacks any dedicated floating point processing hardware.