ok this just kick's ass (was RE: [rescue] The onyx godness

[Francisco Javier Mesa-Martinez]

On Thu, 16 Jan 2003, dave wrote:

> me at dansikorski.com writes:
>
> >On Thu, 2003-01-16 at 00:00, dave wrote:
> >> me at dansikorski.com writes:
> >> >Control Data Cyber205 S/N 515.  Let no more suffer the same fate.
> >> S/N *. As far as I know, no 205 survives.
>
> >Wow, i just realized that the machine was installed 20 years ago last
> >week.  (January 4-9, 1983).  I was three years old.
>
> Any details?
>
> All I know about the CDC-205 was that it was huge (largest non-tube
> CPU ever?) and that it did memory-to-memory vector ops on really
> long vectors (64K?).
>
> Its memory bandwidth must have been terrifying.

I think that was what killed the machine, the bandwith was actually quite
poor. And since it was based on the star architecture, you could have
instruction that literally took almost a second (if not over) to complete!
A single instruction... Plus scalar performance was also sucky. CDC never
recovered after that series of machines.