ianh@bhpmrl.oz.au (Ian Hoyle) (12/12/90)
Although I've been reticent in the past to believe some of the wild
speculation that comes up from time to time in some newsgroups when
discussing upcoming machines, the occasional accurate piece of info, or
better still, the forming of an overall picture of what is on the horizon often
plays an integral part in any strategic, forward planning that we need to
perform for determining our computing needs in the immediate and near future.
So what might the 4xx series (this is what I'm calling them :-) be like.
At our Australian Supercomputer Conference last week a few big hints were
dropped as to what we might be going to see:
1) R4000 cpu. The migration of floating point onto the chip will be an
enormous performance win and should be a *great* competitor for the high
end IBM 6000 boxes. ... and these are coming sooner than I thought they
would.
2) A faster bus. Certainly we have seen a non-linear flattening of the
performance curve when running VoxelView Plus on our Power Series machines
(240GTX and 280GTX). Past 6 processors the bus appears to saturate.
3) The faster bus should accomodate a 16 processor machine.
4) The caches will grow substantially. I have heard the figure of 1Mb being
bandied about.
5) Support for larger main memory (>1 Gb ??) and total disk space.
How close am I to the real truth? I've now doubt Mountain View will probably
say "it's *way* too early to discuss this stuff", but since comp.sys.sgi
_ought_ to be a discussion forum for the users ie. US, what have others to add
to this thread ???
ian
--
Ian Hoyle
/\/\ Image Processing & Data Analysis Group
/ / /\ BHP Research
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E-mail : ianh@bhpmrl.oz.au