BGB <cr88192@gmail.com> writes:
>On 2/18/2024 8:13 PM, Lawrence D'Oliveiro wrote:
>> On Sun, 18 Feb 2024 18:13:42 -0600, BGB wrote:
>>
>>> ... things like GUI can be handled with IPC calls.
>>
>> Which is how X11 and Wayland do it. The bottleneck is in the user response
>> time, so the overhead of message-passing calls is insignificant.
>>
>
>IIRC, X11 had worked by passing message buffers over Unix sockets (with
>Xlib as a wrapper interface over the socket-level interface).

The shared memory extension allows clients to directly access
buffers in the server.

https://www.x.org/releases/X11R7.7/doc/xextproto/shm.html

According to Lawrence D'Oliveiro <ldo@nz.invalid>:
>On Sun, 18 Feb 2024 21:41:55 +0000, MitchAlsup1 wrote:
>
>> Seymour's talent was in packaging not in computer architecture.
>
>Bit unlikely, considering his supers didn’t use any very fancy packaging
>techniques at all.

Huh? Maybe not for individual chips, but the wiring and cooling and overall
physical design were famous. Here's an article about it:

https://american.cs.ucdavis.edu/academic/readings/papers/CRAY-technology.pdf

--
Regards,
John Levine, johnl@taugh.com, Primary Perpetrator of "The Internet for Dummies",
Please consider the environment before reading this e-mail. https://jl.ly

Lawrence D'Oliveiro wrote:

> On Sun, 18 Feb 2024 21:41:55 +0000, MitchAlsup1 wrote:

>> Seymour's talent was in packaging not in computer architecture.

> Bit unlikely, considering his supers didn’t use any very fancy packaging
> techniques at all.

Consider cooling a refrigerator sized computer that emits 300 KW
of heat ?? That IS a packaging problem and an interesting one, too.

Lawrence D'Oliveiro wrote:
> On Sun, 18 Feb 2024 08:59 +0000 (GMT Standard Time), John Dallman wrote:
>
>> And they didn't start publicising it until 1998, IIRC. If they thought
>> it wasn't going to work, they could have quietly cancelled it.
>
> I certainly heard about it before then. As I understood it, things went
> quiet because it was taking longer than expected to make it all work. But
> there were obviously those sufficiently high up in the management chain
> who were determined not to be proven wrong. Otherwise, it could have been
> cancelled.
>
I ordered the Itanium architecture manual as soon as the cpu was
announced, and was very impressed. If it had turned up just 3 years
later (instead of 7?), and at the originally promised speed/clock
frequency, it would have been extremely competitive indeed.

Terje

--
- <Terje.Mathisen at tmsw.no>
"almost all programming can be viewed as an exercise in caching"

On Mon, 19 Feb 2024 15:06:35 GMT, Scott Lurndal wrote:

>On 2/18/2024 8:13 PM, Lawrence D'Oliveiro wrote:
>
>> On Sun, 18 Feb 2024 18:13:42 -0600, BGB wrote:
>>
>>> ... things like GUI can be handled with IPC calls.
>>
>> Which is how X11 and Wayland do it. The bottleneck is in the user
>> response time, so the overhead of message-passing calls is
>> insignificant.
>
> The shared memory extension allows clients to directly access buffers in
> the server.
>
> https://www.x.org/releases/X11R7.7/doc/xextproto/shm.html

Notice that’s only for sharing image data. All the rest of the messages
(e.g. event notifications) still go over a stream-oriented socket.

On Mon, 19 Feb 2024 16:25:19 -0000 (UTC), John Levine wrote:

> According to Lawrence D'Oliveiro <ldo@nz.invalid>:
>>On Sun, 18 Feb 2024 21:41:55 +0000, MitchAlsup1 wrote:
>>
>>> Seymour's talent was in packaging not in computer architecture.
>>
>>Bit unlikely, considering his supers didn’t use any very fancy packaging
>>techniques at all.
>
> Huh? Maybe not for individual chips, but the wiring and cooling and
> overall physical design were famous.

From Charles J Murray’s “The Supermen” (1997), pages 128-129:

“Cray had avoided the use of integrated circuits, or chips, for
nearly six years. As early as 1966, when he’d started on the CDC
7600, integrated circuits were commercially available at about
five dollars each, making them roughly equivalent in price to a
pile of discrete components. Even then, engineers understood the
advantages of integrated circuits: They eliminated the need for
careful hand soldering of individual components to a printed
circuit board.

“But Cray had always made a point of lagging a generation behind
the technology curve. That was precisely what he’d done on the
6600—using the silicon transistor almost a decade after its
introduction. ...

“In 1972 Cray knew it was time to use integrated circuits.”

So the Cray-1 was his first computer using integrated circuits.

On 2/17/24 7:27 PM, Lawrence D'Oliveiro wrote:
> On Sat, 17 Feb 2024 22:30 +0000 (GMT Standard Time), John Dallman wrote:
>
>> To a modern understanding, it is insane.
>
> I think that was already becoming apparent even before it finally shipped.
>
> I think HP and Intel started the project around 1990, and it only reached
> production quality by nearly the end of that decade. During that time,
> RISC architectures continued to improve, with things like superscalar,
> multiple function units and out-of-order execution--basically leaving
> IA-64 in the dust before it could even ship.
>
> I think it was only fear of loss of corporate face that kept the project
> going when it became clear it should have been abandoned.
>

The Oral History of Robert P Colwell had some relevant content:

> But how would you use a simulator if you don't have a compiler?
> He said, well that's true we don't have a compiler yet, so I
> hand assembled my simulations. I asked "How did you do thousands
> of line of code that way?" He said “No, I did 30 lines of code”.
> Flabbergasted, I said, "You're predicting the entire future of
> this architecture on 30 lines of hand generated code?"
> [chuckle], I said it just like that, I did not mean to be
> insulting but I was just thunderstruck. Andy Grove piped up and
> said "we are not here right now to reconsider the future of this
> effort, so let’s move on". I said "Okay, it's your money, if
> that's what you want."
>
> Suddenly this came up again later in another guise but again
> Andy shut me off, he said "we're not here to discuss it". Gordon
> Moore is sitting next to me and hasn’t said a word, he looks to
> all intents and purposes like he's asleep. He's got his eyes
> closed most of the time, you think okay, the guy's tired, he's
> old. But no, 20 minutes into this, he suddenly opens his eyes
> and he points to me and he asks, "did you get ever get an answer
> to your question?" and I said, "actually no, none that I can
> understand". Gordon looked around and says, "how are we planning
> to move ahead with this, if the answers don't make sense?" and
> this time Andy Grove said to him "We’re not here to discuss
> that, Gordon".

mitchalsup@aol.com (MitchAlsup1) writes:
> I had the first 200 MHz Pentium Pro out of the Micron factory.
> It ran DOOM at 73 fps and Quake at 45+ fps both full screen.
> I would not call that a joke.
>
> It was <essentially> the death knell for RISC workstations.

2003, 32 processor, max. configured IBM mainframe Z990 benchmarked
aggregate 9BIPS

2003 Pentium4 processor benchmarked 9.7BIPS

Also 1988, ibm branch office asked if I could help LLNL standardized
some serial stuff they were playing with which quickly becomes fibre
channel standard (FCS, initial 1gbit, full-duplex, 200mbytes/sec
aggregate). Then some IBM mainframe engineers become involved and
define a heavy-weight protocol that significantly reduces the native
throughput, which is released as FICON.

The most recent public benchmark I can find is "PEAK I/O" benchmark for
max. configured z196 getting 2M IOPS using 104 FICON (running over 104
FCS). About the same time a FCS was announced for E5-2600 blades
claiming over million IOPS (two having higher throughput than 104
FICON). Also IBM pubs recommend that System Assist Processors ("SAPs"
that do the actual I/O), be kept to no more than 70% processor ... which
would be about 1.5M IOPS).

--
virtualization experience starting Jan1968, online at home since Mar1970

jgd@cix.co.uk (John Dallman) writes:

> In article <79833d0dcdebb9e173c5cd2c6029e851@www.novabbs.org>,
> mitchalsup@aol.com (MitchAlsup1) wrote:
>
>> I had the first 200 MHz Pentium Pro out of the Micron factory...
>> It was <essentially> the death knell for RISC workstations.
>
> Yup. They struggled on for some time, but they never got near the
> price-performance.

64-bit support was what kept RISC workstations alive for a time.

--
Jean-Marc

On Mon, 26 Feb 2024 20:48:50 +0100, Jean-Marc Bourguet wrote:

> 64-bit support was what kept RISC workstations alive for a time.

Still, nowadays it seems a lot of Windows software is still 32-bit.
Whereas on a 64-bit Linux workstation, everything is 64-bit.

On Mon, 26 Feb 2024 21:57 +0000 (GMT Standard Time), John Dallman wrote:

> Microsoft are gradually retiring 32-bit x86 versions of their operating
> system, but they won't take away the ability to run 32-bit applications
> in the foreseeable future, because there are still plenty around.

I was mildly surprised to discover recently that Microsoft Visual
Studio only made the transition to 64-bit a couple of years ago. And
today I was even more surprised to discover that they haven’t quite
completed the transition: it seems the Windows Forms designer has
trouble because a lot of components are still 32-bit
<https://devclass.com/2024/02/26/microsoft-struggles-to-address-fallout-from-windows-forms-designer-failure-in-64-bit-visual-studio/>.