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Wikipedia comments that the ND500/ND5000 architecture wasn't especially Unix friendly as it was based on a 16-bit front-end & I/O ND100 processor to the 32-bit
by pinewurst 7y ago
Wikipedia comments that the ND500/ND5000 architecture wasn't especially Unix friendly as it was based on a 16-bit front-end & I/O ND100 processor to the 32-bit ND500/ND5000 cpus. Also that this was ultimately a system bottleneck for competition in general.
- elygre 7y agoYeah, key to programming the ND500 and ND5000 series was to utilize the ND100 properly. Way too much software would overload the ND100, while leaving the ND500(0) running idle.
- Tor3 7y agoThe ND-100 was a bottleneck for the 500 series, and initially also for the 5000 series. But as time went by the 5000 series acquired intelligent I/O interfaces sitting directly on the Multi-Function bus on the 5000, and there was less and less of a bottleneck. The systems I worked on had to get the absolute last possible drop of I/O performance out of it, and by having the ND-100 do its own I/O in parallel with I/O on the 5000 the whole thing worked very efficiently in the early nineties. The bottleneck, near the end, moved to the 5000 (or 5700, as it were) CPU instead. A Sun 4 could run circles around the 5700 in processing time - at one point I ran all our Fortran code through f2c and executed it on the Sun. Wow. That's when I started to talk with the customer about a possible rehost (which we did, to an SGI).