3 ms·

Its successor, the CDC 7600 seems to be in the ballpark of a 386 PC, similar CPU speed and similar memory. I wonder if the CDC 7600 (or even the 6600) could run

• rahen 3y ago
  Those machines are vectorized, batch computers. They process data in an entirely different way and also lack the required IOs. I doubt Doom on an ASR-33 would be much fun.
  • mschaef 3y ago
    The CDC 6600 could run multiple functional units (adder, multiplier, logic, etc.) at the same time, and the CDC 7600 added pipelining to the mix. These machines were organized in such a way that the main CPU did not run (most of) the OS and was not responsible for I/O. Those operations were all handled by an array of secondary processors optimized for the purpose. A PPU (Peripheral Processing Unit) would interact with an I/O device, load data into main memory, and then notify the main CPU. Vector came later, with the Cray 1 (and the CDC Star, less effectively).
  • Aardwolf 3y ago
    > I doubt Doom on an ASR-33 would be much fun But on those two round CRT's that show up in CDC 6600 pictures it might look pretty cool, even if they're vector drawing
• adrian_b 3y ago
  For general-purpose integer computations, a 386 PC would have been similar or even better in speed. For floating-point operations, a CDC 7600 would have been at least ten to twenty time faster (but less precise) than the 80387DX coprocessor. A 386 PC without coprocessor could have been one thousand times slower that CDC 7600 at FP operations. Only with Pentium (the first Intel consumer CPU with pipelined FPU, they previously had the non-PC CPU Intel 80860 that was faster than CDC 7600) the PCs have exceeded the FP speed of the ancient supercomputers.