[Beowulf] The Mind Behind the Nascom-1

John Hearns hearnsj at googlemail.com
Wed Aug 21 09:57:12 PDT 2013


http://www.theregister.co.uk/2013/08/21/unsung_heroes_dr_chris_shelton/

worth sticking with thsi article till page 4 - or indeed just advance
straight to page 4.

The concepts behind that PgC7000 processor were pretty revolutionary!
An Ultra-RISC core, overclocking itself as much as it could, decoupled from
clocked I/O
Bipolar logic instead of CMOS (*) - to go faster. Low voltage operation.


"Today, Shelton reckons, even fabbed using CMOS rather than bipolar, it
would be barely a millimetre in size yet capable of clock speeds of many
gigahertz."
Wow  - wish someone would do that! We need something revolutionary.


(*) ps.whatever happened to my 'first love' - emitter coupled logic?
I spent many happy hours as a graduate student (**) in learning about
FASTBUS for (at the time)
blazingly fast DAQ - because ECL goes faster.
I guess no-one can fight City Hall (or commodity chips)


(**)  Yes - I SHOULD have been chasing girls! Later found in life
that women are really UNIMPRESSED with fancy DAQ hardware.
Now - red Mazda sports cars? Now you're talking.
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://www.beowulf.org/pipermail/beowulf/attachments/20130821/45603c7c/attachment.html>


More information about the Beowulf mailing list