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Which Machines Do Computer Architects Admire? (2013)
- gumby 7y agoSurprised the PDP-6/10 didn’t make the list as it was the dominant research architecture for a certain period. Another Gordon Bell jewel.
- kjs3 7y agoAlas...so little respect for the 36-bitters these days. The PDP-10 especially was hugely influential.
- cubano 7y agoI wrote my first non-BASIC program ever on a PDP-10 or 11 and as I remember, it was one of those numberical programming for Engineers classes where we had to figure out why, when using floating-points vs integer math, that 2 != 2.0 (because 2.0 was actually 2.0000000000001 of course) The funny thing was...no one told me the secret and I musta spent 5 long hours pulling out my hair. If I remember right, one of the RAs running the computer center finally had pity on me and showed me what was going on... I'm not really sure I can call them the "good ole days of programming", but that was how things were done back then.
- oddity 7y agoThe list seems biased towards pre-2001, so I’ll toss one in: Cell. I hold that it was so ahead of its time, it dragged game devs, kicking and screaming, into the future ahead of schedule when they were forced to support the PS3 for the extended console cycle. :) Larrabee was cute, but to this day I still have no idea what their target workload was.
- kjs3 7y agoYup. Most of this was culled from a 2001 conference (so small but distinguished sample set), and you really need to read the detail to understand what they were appreciative of. It's not a good/bad thing and probably represented what they were thinking about at the time (e.g. Alpert calls out Multiflow because it influenced a processor he built). Sites even includes a backhand at VAX by calling it the example of what they didn't do in Alpha; damning with faint praise. I haven't fired up my Cell dev board (Mercury) in a while. Prolly should do that. :-)
- CalChris 7y agoInteresting that the B5000 didn't make this list. Berkeley CS252 has been reading the Design of the B5000 System paper for years. The lecture slides don't criticize it but Computer Organization and Design sorta does: The Burroughs B5000 was the commercial fountainhead of this philosophy (High-Level-Language Computer Architectures), but today there is no significant commercial descendant of this 1960s radical.
- Aloha 7y agoI was also surprised - but I wonder thats the computer architectures language designers like, not computer architects.
- bane 7y agoSurprised nobody picked the Atari 400/800 and Amiga 500 computers (which are the 8-bit and 16-bit spiritual parent/child machines by the same people). On the other end, pure CPU only machines are kind of interesting as a study in economy, like the ZX Spectrum, a horrible, limited architecture that managed to hit the market at an unreasonably cheap price, make money, and end up with tens of thousands of games.
- k_sze 7y agoYeah, I'm surprised that 6502 makes the list but Z80 and Motorola 68000 don't.
- cubano 7y agoOMG did I love my Atari 800 back in 1985 when it was clearly one of the best price/performance machines available at that time. Overlooked by many (but not all) was its built-in MIDI ports and its abilty to control all those early model beatboxs and synths...unfortunately I forget the name of the rather crappy software that I used to get things talking and synced up, but it did work and the bitmapped color graphics were way ahead of its time. Too bad Atari self destructed with the cartrage business, and who knows what other poor business decisions it made, but that computer was one of my favorite things of my late teens.
- rjsw 7y agoAre you mixing up the Atari 800 and ST, the 800 didn't have MIDI ports.
- agumonkey 7y agoI read recently that Calvin Harris (music celebrity) made his first album on an Amiga.
- erosenbe0 7y agoThe CDC-6000 and Cray-1 designed by Seymour Cray are the most admired, hands down. It is also notable that quite a bit of R&D was done in Chippewa Falls, WI, which is just a regular old town in America's Dairyland.
- arminiusreturns 7y agoI'm no architect but I loved the Cray-2. I took over an old datacenter that had one just sitting there and a sense of awe hit me every time I saw it. What cost 12M brand new and was a marvel of engineering (12x faster than Cray-1!) was just sitting there collecting dust. Crazy world this is. They eventually sold it to a collector I think.
- kjs3 7y agoThe Y/MP I got to use was pretty cool too...a multiprocessor Cray. But then that's a Chen design and I don't imagine Seymour would approve of everything that went into it.
- LgWoodenBadger 7y agoIn college our ACM chapter named its DEC machine (I think it was a Tru64, but it's so long ago I don't remember) "cray-ymp." If you were a member of the ACM you got an account on it, and I used to MUD from it. One of the MUD admins was astounded when he noticed I was playing from what he thought was a real Cray Y/MP. If I was smarter I would have played along. Alas...
- kjs3 7y agoMissed opportunity for amusement. Funny enough the Y/MP-48 was running Unicos (Cray's mostly-Unix) and someone had compiled nethack or rouge or something similar and was playing it until he had sucked up all the funny-money the department had budgeted for the year (yeah...we got accounted for CPU time, and yeah...someone screwed up the quotas). There was a kerfuffle....
- 7y ago
- bathtub365 7y agoWell, pretty much anything will run AutoCAD these days.
- choonway 7y agosame goes for CATIA V5...
- kragen 7y agoThere are some really great designers on the list, like Sophie Wilson and Gordon Bell, but the list of admirable machines comes up really short — and missing a lot of really significant and admirable machines. Maybe these are the machines bad computer architects, like Alpert, admire. Alpert is notable mostly for leading the computer industry's most expensive and embarrassing failure, the Itanic (formally known as the Itanium), despite the presence on his team of many of the world's best CPU designers, who had just come from designing the HP-PA --- a niche CPU architecture nevertheless so successful that HP's workstation competitors, such as NeXT, started using it. Earlier in his career he sunk the already-struggling 32000, the machine that by rights should have been the 68000. (And maybe if they'd funded GCC it could have been.) What about the Tera MTA, with its massive hardware multithreading and its packet-switched RAM, which was gorgeous and prefigured significant features of the GPU explosion? What about the DG Nova, with its bitslice ALU chips and horizontal-microcode instructions? What about the MuP21, with its radical on-chip dual circular stacks? What about the HP 9100, with its dual stacks and PCB-inductance microcode, where the instruction set was the user interface? What about the LGP-30, which managed to deliver a usable von Neumann computer with only 113 vacuum tubes (for amplification, inversion, and sequencing)? What about the 26-bit ARM, with its conditional execution on every instruction, and packing the program status register into the program counter so it automatically gets restored by subroutine return, and, more importantly, interrupt return? What about Thumb-2 with its unequaled code density? What about the CM-1? Anyone can see that AVX-512 (or for that matter modern timing-attack-resistant AES implementations!) owe everything to the CM-1. And the conspicuous omission of the Burroughs 5000 has already been noted by others. I mean, there are some good designs on the list! But it hardly seems like a very comprehensive list of admirable designs.
- kjs3 7y agoIt was never intended as a comprehensive list. Best if you actually read the article. It's been floating around for more than a decade. Alpert is a bad architect...funny.
- AceJohnny2 7y agoI can think of many ways you could've phrased this without being downright aggressive.
- tachyonbeam 7y agoI think one of the most influential designs of recent times has been the DEC Alpha lineage of 64-bit RISC processors[1]. Originally introduced in 1992, with a superscalar design, branch prediction, instruction and data caches, register renaming, speculative execution, etc. My understanding is that when these came out, they were way ahead of any other CPU out there, both in terms of innovative design and performance. Looking at this chip, it seems to me that almost all the innovations Intel brought to the Pentium lines of CPU over many years were basically reimplementing features pioneered by the DEC Alpha, just over a decade later, and bringing these innovations to consumer-grade CPUs. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DEC_Alpha https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DEC_Alpha
- shaklee3 7y agoAlpha is also unique in that it's the only architecture that doesn't preserve data dependency ordering.
- xscott 7y agoI loved working on DEC Alphas. They seemed to me like the best of breed conventional 64 bit machines, and it was sad when we quit buying them because x86 boxes were cheaper. > it seems to me that almost all the innovations Intel brought to the Pentium lines of CPU over many years were basically reimplementing features pioneered by the DEC Alpha I can't find a strong source to link, but I thought most of the Alpha team ended up at Intel. If so, that would explain the trickling in of re-implementations.
- cameldrv 7y agoPentium Pro should be on the list. The out of order execution, especially with the micro-op translation was a huge breakthrough.
- xscott 7y agoI'm not a computer architect (so my opinion shouldn't count in this thread), but as someone who did a lot of numerical programming over the years, I really thought Itanium looked super promising. The idea that you can indicate a whole ton of instructions can be run in parallel seemed really scalable for FFTs and linear algebra. Instead of more cores, give me more ALUs. I know "most" software doesn't have enough work between branches to fill up that kind of pipeline, but machine learning and signal processing can certainly use long branchless basic blocks if you can fit them in icache. At the time, it seemed (to me at least) that it really only died because the backwards compatibility mode was slow. (I think some of the current perception of Itanium is revisionist history.) It's tough to say what it could've become if AMD64 hadn't eaten it's lunch by running precompiled software better. It would've been interesting if Intel and compiler writers could've kept focus on it. Nowdays, it's obvious GPUs are the winners for horsepower, and it's telling that we're willing to use new languages and strategies to get that win. However, GPU programming really feels like you're locked outside of the box - you shuffle the data back and forth to it. I like to imagine a C-like language (analogous to CUDA) that would pump a lot of instructions to the "Explicitly Parallel" architecture. Now we're all stuck with the AMD64 ISA for our compatibility processor, and it seems like another example where the computing world isn't as good as it should be.
- sansnomme 7y agoThat C like language is called "Verilog". (Yes I know it's a HDL but the point still stands. FPGAs are commodity these days.)
- xscott 7y agoHeh, I suspect hardware folks would like a CPU which programmed well with Verilog or VHDL, and I know that trying to make a hardware description language accessible to software folks has been a pipe dream for at least 25 years. However, I don't think Verilog was the solution for Itanium, and the useful niche for FPGAs seems increasingly limited to low Size Weight And Power realms. The FPGA projects I've seen (using very high end FPAGs, not commodity/cheap ones) seem like they're always bumping up against clock rates and making timing as soon as they try to do anything approaching what you can do on a CPU or GPU. Of course there are exceptions where the FPGA does really simple and parallel things, but FPAGs aren't a panacea.
- tlb 7y agoIt's disappointing that most machines today suck so badly. How did that become the state of the industry, with so many smart people working so hard and nobody likes their latest designs? The last high-performance design I actually liked was the DEC Alpha. You could write a useful JIT compiler in a couple hundred lines. I suspect that nVidia's recent GPUs are wonderfully clever inside, but they don't publish their ISA and the drivers are super-clunky. So I can't admire them. I appreciate the performance of intel Core chips, but there's so much to dislike. The ISA is literally too big to fully document. The kernel needs 1000s of workarounds for CPU weirdnesses. You have to apply security patches to microcode, FFS. RISC-V would be great if we had fast servers and laptops.
- oddity 7y ago> How did that become the state of the industry, with so many smart people working so hard and nobody likes their latest designs? The average consumer doesn't buy a fantastically well designed CPU if it doesn't run the software they care about. x86, externally, is horrifically ugly primarily because of backwards compatibility (I've legitimately had a nightmare once from writing an x86 JIT compiler). Internally, I'm almost certain it's an incredible feat of engineering. People who admire architecture aren't a powerful market force, I'm sad to say.
- kjs3 7y agoWhat's wrong with Power 8 & 9? What's wrong with ARM64? What was wrong with Sparc64 until Oracle screwed it up (well...register windows...ok). How is RISC-V intrinsically better than those architectures, considering it doesn't exist in a form that performs anywhere near as fast?
- agumonkey 7y agoMass market doesn't value admiration
- fouc 7y agoAnyone admire forthchips? Such as the 144-core chip from http://www.greenarraychips.com http://www.greenarraychips.com
- vi-mode 7y agoI'm into computers for decades. The first time after ages a computer blew my mind again was when I got deep into k8s. If you haven't yet do it now, check k8s out, get knee-deep into it and not from a devops perspective but as one who admire computers.
- bloopernova 7y agoMore software than hardware, but I share the same wonder at Kubernetes. I love the whole concept of: "this is a big blob that runs your stuff, don't worry about networking and some other server-type considerations, just run your apps and there's a bunch of magic" It's a little sad to see my previous career disappear, I'd love nothing more than to manage some VMware clusters running Linux VMs for the rest of my life, but technology moves on. It's forcing me to become a coder and manager rather than sysadmin.
- ChuckMcM 7y agoI was always partial to the DEC-10 architecture. That said my first exposure to a machine that had been really well thought out was the IBM 360.
- PeterStuer 7y agoAs far as processors are concerned I loved the Zilog Z80 and the Motorola 68000. Oddly enough I really disliked the MT 6502 and the Intel 8086. As total systems I loved the HP 41CX, the Sinclair ZX Spectrum, the Symbolics Lisp Machine and the Apple Mac IIcx (or really just any Mac before the PowerPC debacle). After that era, I just started home-building x86 machines, and while there was the odd preferred component, it never went beyond the 'A is better than B' stage.
- kazinator 7y agoI started on the 6502, but outgrew it. Still, cult chip! I mean, something like the following shows obsessive dedication to the thing: http://www.visual6502.org/JSSim/ http://www.visual6502.org/JSSim/
- squarefoot 7y agoM68k and Z80 IMO deserved to be in that list much more than x86.
- bloopernova 7y agoThe Z80 and its implementation in the ZX Spectrum 48k will always have a place in my heart. So many BASIC games typed out, so many magazine tapes loading strange programs and games. And the M68K powered my Atari ST, my friends Amigas, and so much more. Makes me wish I could get a small ZX Spectrum, Atari ST, and Amiga hardware kit that would interface with USB HID stuff and output displayport/hdmi. (rather than software emulation on a Raspberry Pi)
- dillonmckay 7y agohttps://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/VAX-11 https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/VAX-11 32 bit system from the late 1970s.
- bitminer 7y agoThe VAX was, I think, co-designed alongside VMS. The two together were an innovative design, distinguishing architecture from implementation, a comprehensive isa, a roadmap for the future, etc etc. VAXcluster was amazing integration of both. I believe the design was influenced by Djikstra's Structured Programming book but have no evidence. My epiphany on the issues with the isa came when I discovered that the checksum calculation used by the VMS backup utility was faster when done in a short instruction loop over the microcoded instruction. MicroVAX II. Microcodes were a huge barrier between the speed potential of the electronics and the actual visible isa. Duh! Cray knew this, but he didn't build product lines, just single point products. Sun built product lines with RISC and ate Digital Equipment's lunch.
- DonHopkins 7y agoI always thought of the 6809 as the Chrysler Cordoba of 8 bit microprocessors, with soft Corinthian Leather upholstery and a luxurious automatic multiply instruction. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vsg97bxuJnc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vsg97bxuJnc
- cptnapalm 7y agoI have a small IBM 390 which I haven't been able to find out much, but I did spot while searching that my 1999 S/390 has a 256 byte cache line. That's 4x over a 2020 i7.
- Merrill 7y ago>Processor design pitfalls - Designing a high-level ISA to support a specific language of language domain Is there an equivalent pitfall in designing the ISA to support a specific Virtual Machine? For example, wouldn't the performance of a server processor when running the Java Virtual Machine be a key factor in determining its commercial success? I've always wondered whether the failure of Itanium wasn't at least partly caused by the shift from binary executables to bytecode with the contemporary success of the Java language. Even when JIT compilers were used, they were probably too simple to take advantage of the VLIW architecture.
- pdimitar 7y agoI don't feel that's the core reason but you do bring up a good point; some technologies are too good for their time and get swept in the history books due to nobody having a clue how to utilise them properly. Not sure if that's the exact case for Itanium but your argument fired a neuron. :)
- ragerino 7y agoI admire AMDs Zen architecture.
- yjftsjthsd-h 7y agoFor internal engineering beauty, or because it apparently made good trade offs and is taking the market to town right now? :-)
- McTossOut 7y agoI like puzzling over how a quantum computer ISA might pan out.
- mtreis86 7y agoThe machines I most admire are mechanical computers like the ones used in WWII era battle ships for targeting their long guns. Those machines performed differentiation and curve matching using cams and gears.
- rootbear 7y agoThere is a fascinating series of videos on YouTube that describe the US Navy analog fire control computers. I had no idea such things existed until I came across those videos.
- bloopernova 7y agoA friend's father back in the early 90s was convinced that analogue computers were going to come back and kick the asses of these newfangled digital pretenders :) He was a little strange, but I loved seeing his workshop and attempts at building such computers. It's a pity I'm not in touch any more, I would like to learn a bit more about what he was actually doing and if it was effective at all.
- rootbear 7y agoI'm tempted to suggest Babbage's Analytical Engine, on the basis of shear audacity alone. Babbage was just amazingly ahead of his time.
- tyingq 7y agoAre there any notable/not-just-academic "clean sheet" CPU architecture efforts other than what Mill computing is doing?
- bshanks 7y agoThe ones listed by 4 or more people (not including Bell) were: - CDC-6600 and 7600 - listed by Fisher, Sites, Smith, Worley - Cray-1 - listed by Hill, Patterson, Sites, Smith, Sohi, Wallach (also Bell, sorta) - IBM S/360 and S/370 - listed by Alpert, Hill, Patterson, Sites (also Bell) - MIPS - listed by Alpert, Hill, Patterson, Sohi, Worley Special mention: - 6502 - only listed by Wilson, but she was the chief architect of ARM so i think her choice is important to note - Itanium - mentioned in the top-ranked comment in this HN discussion - DEC Alpha - mentioned in the second-ranked comment in this HN discussion
- MaxBarraclough 7y agoNo mention of the SuperH.