SRFERGU@ERENJ.BITNET (Scott Ferguson) (12/14/89)
Here's a good one you can get a chuckle out of (or not): A company called Mercury Computer Systems makes plug-in boards for computer systems. The boards are based on Weitek floating-point chips, and have their own C and Fortran compilers. They run at something like 20 MFLOPS, and plug into an AT-bus. About two years ago, we bought one of these boards for heavy image corrections and it worked real well. With 10 MBytes of RAM on the board, it cost about $10,000. I've been griping about 3rd-parties not upgrading to SR10 to the ozone for a while, and I decided it was about time to really start getting on their case about it. Mercury, saying they've only got 5-10 Apollo-using customers, and isn't going to bother re-doing their software for SR10. So, I can either throw out the board and go to sr10, or stay at 9.7 for the rest of my days or until I replace all my Apollos with some other brand. Anyhow, I was just wondering: Is there some kind of unwritten legal obligation for a vendor to provide usability for a period of time? This board has only been here for less than two years, and that's not a sufficient product cycle in my book. Maybe we jost got hosed, I wasn't here when we bought the thing, but I'm tired of telling myself that "that would work if I had sr10 up", and now my system is doomed to stagnation. I wouldn't mind being able to legally force the company to upgrade. Thanks for listening to my weeps, and I'll take offers on a Mercury MC32 array processor from anyone interested (I've got a nice bridge in Brooklyn, cheap, too!) Scott Ferguson Exxon Research & Engineering Annandale, NJ 08801 (201) 730-2339
rtp1@tank.uchicago.edu (raymond thomas pierrehumbert) (12/15/89)
for Macs and Suns) is only for very special circumstances (multiply and accumulate). The typical speed is more like 2-3 megaflops. I thought about buying a Mercury board, but decided against it for more or less the reasons that eventually caught up with you. By way of comparison, a processor for the DN10000 does 28 megaflops on dotproduct (single precision), 6-7 megaflops on a broad range of code, and costs about $13000 to universities. The extra cost is worth the support. The real killer in the cost of adding a processor is the memory cost, as you really ought to add about 16MB for each new processor. This doubles the cost. Anybody know of any cheap third-party memory for the DN10000?
rtp1@tank.uchicago.edu (raymond thomas pierrehumbert) (12/15/89)
Sorry, somehow my posting got messed up. Here is the correct full text of the posting: Actually that 20megaflops you quote for the Mercury board (also available for Macs and Suns) is only for very special circumstances (multiply and accumulate). The typical speed is more like 2-3 megaflops. I thought about buying a Mercury board, but decided against it for more or less the reasons that eventually caught up with you. By way of comparison, a processor for the DN10000 does 28 megaflops on dotproduct (single precision), 6-7 megaflops on a broad range of code, and costs about $13000 to universities. The extra cost is worth the support. The real killer in the cost of adding a processor is the memory cost, as you really ought to add about 16MB for each new processor. This doubles the cost. Anybody know of any cheap third-party memory for the DN10000?