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The author of the article paints a picture of a situation in which expensive hardware was purchased on a whim without much planning beforehand. This hardware wa
by jasoneckert 3y ago
The author of the article paints a picture of a situation in which expensive hardware was purchased on a whim without much planning beforehand. This hardware was ill suited to their task, and ultimately led to failure of the project while others (e.g., ARM) were quickly producing RISC designs with low budgets.
This sort of thing isn't uncommon in larger organizations that have money to burn on R&D. As a result, it's probably safe to say Apple was in a position that allowed them to burn a lot of money in the late 1980s.
- danw1979 3y ago> In due course, the team found that the Sun workstations that they attached to the supercomputer could run their software just as quickly as the Cray itself.
- twoodfin 3y agoI’m going to give the technical management the benefit of the doubt here, and assume the $15M Cray wasn’t primarily for chip design, but rather architectural simulation. This was intended to be a parallel system across several layers, while wrapping in a number of novel architectural ideas. It would not have been ridiculous to assume having a massively parallel supercomputer to experiment with those ideas more quickly would be worth the expense.
- wrs 3y agoThe Cray was put to good use doing plastic injection molding simulations that saved millions of dollars on prototype mold tools. This was the era when the desktop Mac folks were making insanely complex screwless plastic cases that basically snapped together.
- eyelidlessness 3y agoOh I remember those cases! They seemed brilliant… until snap parts got stressed and snapped themselves, or worse when they “got you” snapping back in.
- sillywalk 3y agoSeymour Cray was reported to have used a Mac for part of the Cray Supercomputer design work.
- jecel 3y agoIt was a joke: when Seymour was informed that Apple was using a Cray machine to design their computers he said something like "funny, I use an Apple computer to design the Cray". But in reality he never used computers at all but did everything with paper and pencil.
- jgalt212 3y agoIIRC, for similar reasons, American Express purchased a Cray to AI fraud detection. I guess it was a giants rules engine. An former Amex exec reported to me it was a waste of money and the cheaper statisical models worked much better.