haramoto@zodiac.rutgers.edu (01/10/90)
Intel Corp. is expected to announce today a new low-priced supercomputer that can string together as many as 128 internal processors. Called the iPSC/860, the machine can combine groups of Intel's i860 microprocessor chips in a so-called hypercube, an arrangement in which each processor, according to a person close to Intel, based in Santa Clara, Calif. The computer offers processing power at about one-tenth the cost of that offered by supercomputer king Cray Research Inc.'s Y-MP machines, he said. The machine is part of Intel's attempt to position itself in a growing market for extremely high-speed computers among businesses that, until now, could only afford to rent time at high prices on ohters' supercomputers. The iPSC/860 would typically be tied together with other office computers to handle tasks, such as huge numbers of calculations, that conventional machines can't do quickly, said Terry Bennet, research director at the market- research firm InfoCorp. "This thing will have quite an impact on the high- performance computing market," he said. Intel has been developing and selling supercomputers from its Beaverton, Ore.-based Intel Scientific Computers unit since the mid-1980s. The iPSC/860 will be the first to use the i860 processor, a chip unveiled last year that employs reduced-instruction set computing, or RISC, technology. The iPSC/860 will be available in five models, ranging from a $265,000 machine that processes 480 million calculations called floating point operations per second, or flops, to a model priced at about $3 million, people familiar with the machine said. The low-end machine contains 16 processors, while the high-end computer strings together 128 processors. The machines are air-cooled and will run programs written for the UNIX operating system, they said. Cray computers typically sell for $15 million or more, and are cooled by special fluids. Two large iPSC/860 systems are already installed in Oak Ridge National Laboratory and the Ames Research Center of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, the people familiar with the computers said, and Intel has additional orders from customers such as Ford Motor Co., Prudential- Bache Securities and NASA's Langley Research Center. (from The WSJ, 1/8/90)
nick@lfcs.ed.ac.uk (Nick Rothwell) (01/11/90)
In article <490.25aaf86a@zodiac.rutgers.edu>, haramoto@zodiac writes: > The machine is part of Intel's attempt to position itself in a growing >market for extremely high-speed computers among businesses that, until >now, could only afford to rent time at high prices on ohters' supercomputers. >The iPSC/860 would typically be tied together with other office computers >to handle tasks, such as huge numbers of calculations, that conventional >machines can't do quickly ...as long as you don't need to address more than 640K of memory. (sorry, couldn't resist!) Nick. -- Nick Rothwell, Laboratory for Foundations of Computer Science, Edinburgh. nick@lfcs.ed.ac.uk <Atlantic Ocean>!mcvax!ukc!lfcs!nick ~~ ~~ ~~ ~~ ~~ ~~ ~~ ~~ ~~ ~~ ~~ ~~ ~~ ~~ ~~ ~~ ~~ ~~ ~~ ~~ ~~ ~~ ~~ ~~ ~~ "...all these moments... will be lost in time... like tears in rain."