3 ms·

Seymour Cray had a number of fantastic early designs: CDC-6600, 1964: 60-bit processor @ 10 MHz, 2 MIPS, 1 MFLOPS CDC-7600, 1967: 60-bit processor @ 36 MHz, 1

by tpmx 7y ago

Seymour Cray had a number of fantastic early designs: CDC-6600, 1964: 60-bit processor @ 10 MHz, 2 MIPS, 1 MFLOPS CDC-7600, 1967: 60-bit processor @ 36 MHz, 15 MIPS, 36 MFLOPS Cray-1, 1975: 64-bit processor @ 80 MHz, 80 MIPS, 160 MFLOPS I think this means that if a corresponding development in video coprocessors had been taking place (there wasn't really a recognized need for them back then, as far as I can tell), the CDC-6600 could have been running Wolfenstein 3D decently well in 1964, 28 years before the launch in 1992. And the CDC-7600 could have been running DOOM decently well in 1967, 26 years before the launch in 1993.

kragen 7y ago
The first commercial GPU might have been the LDS-1 from Utah in 1969, which was indeed used for FPS gaming: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/LDS-1_(Line_Drawing_System-1) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/LDS-1_(Line_Drawing_System-1... But it built on the history of “display processors” already in use: http://www.cap-lore.com/Hardware/Wheel.html http://www.cap-lore.com/Hardware/Wheel.html I had thought that computers of the time didn't have enough RAM for a framebuffer, but evidently the CDC6600 did, with what we would call 982 kilobytes today.
- tpmx 7y ago
  Yeah, I guess bitmapped "GPUs" were considered an extreme luxuary/waste of money back then.
  - RantyDave 7y ago
    There still are GPU's that work by rendering the entire display list for every line. Yes, ie thousands of times a second. https://www.ftdichip.com/EVE/EVEProducts.htm https://www.ftdichip.com/EVE/EVEProducts.htm
    - tpmx 7y ago
      That's fascinating! Can you tell us more about their typical use cases? I mean.. I did see https://www.ftdichip.com/EVE/EVEApplications.htm https://www.ftdichip.com/EVE/EVEApplications.htm .. but, in reality? Are you based out of Taiwan?
  - kragen 7y ago
    I suspect they were considered an inefficient use of memory. The TX-0 and PDP-1 had screens of about a million points. For uses like plotting data, playing video games, or drafting mechanical linkages, this resolution is highly desirable — I've done CAD on a 320×200 CGA screen, and the screen resolution was extremely limiting. (For those who haven't used one, this resolution is such that you can fit 25 lines of 40-column text on it before readability starts to suffer.) You could imagine putting something like a 320×200 CGA on a CDC 6600, taking what we would now call 16000 bytes of memory, at a cost of around US$40 000 in 1965 (https://jcmit.net/memoryprice.htm https://jcmit.net/memoryprice.htm says). But it seems like it would be hard to justify that as a good alternative to adding those 16000 bytes to the machine's main memory, supplying an extra 1.6% of its address space with storage and allowing it to tackle problems that were, say, 5% larger. (There may also have been a question of memory speed. The memory cited above that cost US$2.50 a bit was core, and maybe it had a 300 ns cycle time; a 320×200 display at 50 Hz minimally requires a 312.5 ns dot clock, and probably quite a bit faster than that because of the blanking intervals, so you might have needed two to four memory banks just to satisfy the RAMDAC's hunger for pixels. Of course they wouldn't have called it a "RAMDAC" or "dot clock" at the time.)
- RantyDave 7y ago
  Dedicated matrix multiply in 1969. Damn! people in the past, they were nuts.
  - tpmx 7y ago
    I get this realization all of the time when reading about and exploring past innovations (it's one of my primary hobbies). The really smart people back then were just as smart as the really smart people today. It's just they had crappier tech and less knowledge to work with. "On the shoulder of giants" is an old and very true statement.
    - Accujack 7y ago
      It was originally meant as a dig at the height of some fellow scientists, really.
krallja 7y ago
Well, now I know what story is going to show up on HN next month “Wolfenstein 3D on my basement CDC 6600”
tomohawk 7y ago
The Cray's were hard 64 bit machines - smallest addressable unit was 64 bits. This had a lot of implications for software and computer languages that assumed you could easily access bytes.
- tpmx 7y ago
  Ahh..

by tpmx 7y ago

kragen 7y ago

The first commercial GPU might have been the LDS-1 from Utah in 1969, which was indeed used for FPS gaming: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/LDS-1_(Line_Drawing_System-1) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/LDS-1_(Line_Drawing_System-1... But it built on the history of “display processors” already in use: http://www.cap-lore.com/Hardware/Wheel.html http://www.cap-lore.com/Hardware/Wheel.html I had thought that computers of the time didn't have enough RAM for a framebuffer, but evidently the CDC6600 did, with what we would call 982 kilobytes today.

tpmx 7y ago
Yeah, I guess bitmapped "GPUs" were considered an extreme luxuary/waste of money back then.
- RantyDave 7y ago
  There still are GPU's that work by rendering the entire display list for every line. Yes, ie thousands of times a second. https://www.ftdichip.com/EVE/EVEProducts.htm https://www.ftdichip.com/EVE/EVEProducts.htm
  - tpmx 7y ago
    That's fascinating! Can you tell us more about their typical use cases? I mean.. I did see https://www.ftdichip.com/EVE/EVEApplications.htm https://www.ftdichip.com/EVE/EVEApplications.htm .. but, in reality? Are you based out of Taiwan?
- kragen 7y ago
  I suspect they were considered an inefficient use of memory. The TX-0 and PDP-1 had screens of about a million points. For uses like plotting data, playing video games, or drafting mechanical linkages, this resolution is highly desirable — I've done CAD on a 320×200 CGA screen, and the screen resolution was extremely limiting. (For those who haven't used one, this resolution is such that you can fit 25 lines of 40-column text on it before readability starts to suffer.) You could imagine putting something like a 320×200 CGA on a CDC 6600, taking what we would now call 16000 bytes of memory, at a cost of around US$40 000 in 1965 (https://jcmit.net/memoryprice.htm https://jcmit.net/memoryprice.htm says). But it seems like it would be hard to justify that as a good alternative to adding those 16000 bytes to the machine's main memory, supplying an extra 1.6% of its address space with storage and allowing it to tackle problems that were, say, 5% larger. (There may also have been a question of memory speed. The memory cited above that cost US$2.50 a bit was core, and maybe it had a 300 ns cycle time; a 320×200 display at 50 Hz minimally requires a 312.5 ns dot clock, and probably quite a bit faster than that because of the blanking intervals, so you might have needed two to four memory banks just to satisfy the RAMDAC's hunger for pixels. Of course they wouldn't have called it a "RAMDAC" or "dot clock" at the time.)
RantyDave 7y ago
Dedicated matrix multiply in 1969. Damn! people in the past, they were nuts.
- tpmx 7y ago
  I get this realization all of the time when reading about and exploring past innovations (it's one of my primary hobbies). The really smart people back then were just as smart as the really smart people today. It's just they had crappier tech and less knowledge to work with. "On the shoulder of giants" is an old and very true statement.
  - Accujack 7y ago
    It was originally meant as a dig at the height of some fellow scientists, really.

krallja 7y ago

Well, now I know what story is going to show up on HN next month “Wolfenstein 3D on my basement CDC 6600”

tomohawk 7y ago

The Cray's were hard 64 bit machines - smallest addressable unit was 64 bits. This had a lot of implications for software and computer languages that assumed you could easily access bytes.

tpmx 7y ago
Ahh..