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Alliant Computer Systems
Alliant Computer Systems Corporation was a computer company that designed and manufactured parallel computing systems. Together with Pyramid Technology and Sequent Computer Systems, Alliant's machines pioneered the symmetric multiprocessing market. One of the more successful companies in the group, over 650 Alliant systems were produced over their lifetime. The company was hit by a series of financial problems and went bankrupt in 1992. History 1980s Alliant was founded, as Dataflow Systems, in May 1982 by Ron Gruner, Craig Mundie and Rich McAndrew to produce machines for scientific and engineering users who needed smaller, less costly machines than offerings from Cray Computer and similar high-end vendors. Machines that addressed this market segment later became known as minisupercomputers. At the time there was a huge gap on the price/performance curve as a highly configured VAX 11/780 had a performance of about a MIP and MegaFLOP for around $1M USD and a Cray-1S or Cray 1M over ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Private Company
A privately held company (or simply a private company) is a company whose shares and related rights or obligations are not offered for public subscription or publicly negotiated in the respective listed markets, but rather the company's stock is offered, owned, traded, exchanged privately, or Over-the-counter (finance), over-the-counter. In the case of a closed corporation, there are a relatively small number of shareholders or company members. Related terms are closely-held corporation, unquoted company, and unlisted company. Though less visible than their public company, publicly traded counterparts, private companies have major importance in the world's economy. In 2008, the 441 list of largest private non-governmental companies by revenue, largest private companies in the United States accounted for ($1.8 trillion) in revenues and employed 6.2 million people, according to ''Forbes''. In 2005, using a substantially smaller pool size (22.7%) for comparison, the 339 companies on ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Motorola 68030
The Motorola 68030 ("''sixty-eight-oh-thirty''") is a 32-bit microprocessor in the Motorola 68000 family. It was released in 1987. The 68030 was the successor to the Motorola 68020, and was followed by the Motorola 68040. In keeping with general Motorola naming, this CPU is often referred to as the 030 (pronounced ''oh-three-oh'' or ''oh-thirty''). The 68030 is essentially a 68020 with a memory management unit (MMU) and instruction and data caches of 256 bytes each. It added a burst mode (computing), burst mode for the caches, where four longwords can be loaded into the cache in a single operation. The MMU was mostly compatible with the external Motorola 68851, 68851 that would be used with the 68020, but being internal allowed it to access memory one cycle faster than a 68020/68851 combo. The 68030 did not include a built-in floating-point unit (FPU), and was generally used with the Motorola 68881, 68881 and the faster Motorola 68882, 68882. The addition of the FPU was a major d ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Graphics
Graphics () are visual images or designs on some surface, such as a wall, canvas, screen, paper, or stone, to inform, illustrate, or entertain. In contemporary usage, it includes a pictorial representation of data, as in design and manufacture, in typesetting and the graphic arts, and in educational and recreational software. Images that are generated by a computer are called computer graphics. Examples are photographs, drawings, line art, mathematical graphs, line graphs, charts, diagrams, typography, numbers, symbols, geometric designs, maps, engineering drawings, or other images. Graphics often combine text, illustration, and color. Graphic design may consist of the deliberate selection, creation, or arrangement of typography alone, as in a brochure, flyer, poster, web site, or book without any other element. The objective can be clarity or effective communication, association with other cultural elements, or merely the creation of a distinctive style. Graphics ca ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Raster Technologies
Raster may refer to: * Raster graphics, graphical techniques using arrays of pixel values * Raster graphics editor, a computer program * Raster scan, the pattern of image readout, transmission, storage, and reconstruction in television and computer images * Rasterisation, or rasterization, conversion of a vector image to a raster image * Raster image processor, or RIP, a component of a printing system that performs rasterisation * Raster interrupt, a computer interrupt signal * Raster to vector, an image conversion process * Raster bar, an effect used in computer demos * Raster-Noton, a record label * Rastrum, a device used in medieval music manuscripts to draw staff lines * Raster Document Object, a file format People * Christian Raster, statesman in Anhalt-Dessau * Hermann Raster Hermann Raster (May 6, 1827 – July 24, 1891) was an American editor, abolitionist, writer, and anti-temperance political boss who served as chief editor and part-owner of the ''Illinois Staats-Z ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Supercomputer
A supercomputer is a computer with a high level of performance as compared to a general-purpose computer. The performance of a supercomputer is commonly measured in floating-point operations per second ( FLOPS) instead of million instructions per second (MIPS). Since 2017, there have existed supercomputers which can perform over 1017 FLOPS (a hundred quadrillion FLOPS, 100 petaFLOPS or 100 PFLOPS). For comparison, a desktop computer has performance in the range of hundreds of gigaFLOPS (1011) to tens of teraFLOPS (1013). Since November 2017, all of the world's fastest 500 supercomputers run on Linux-based operating systems. Additional research is being conducted in the United States, the European Union, Taiwan, Japan, and China to build faster, more powerful and technologically superior exascale supercomputers. Supercomputers play an important role in the field of computational science, and are used for a wide range of computationally intensive tasks in var ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Superscalar
A superscalar processor is a CPU that implements a form of parallelism called instruction-level parallelism within a single processor. In contrast to a scalar processor, which can execute at most one single instruction per clock cycle, a superscalar processor can execute more than one instruction during a clock cycle by simultaneously dispatching multiple instructions to different execution units on the processor. It therefore allows more throughput (the number of instructions that can be executed in a unit of time) than would otherwise be possible at a given clock rate. Each execution unit is not a separate processor (or a core if the processor is a multi-core processor), but an execution resource within a single CPU such as an arithmetic logic unit. In Flynn's taxonomy, a single-core superscalar processor is classified as an SISD processor (single instruction stream, single data stream), though a single-core superscalar processor that supports short vector operations could ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
RISC
In computer engineering, a reduced instruction set computer (RISC) is a computer designed to simplify the individual instructions given to the computer to accomplish tasks. Compared to the instructions given to a complex instruction set computer (CISC), a RISC computer might require more instructions (more code) in order to accomplish a task because the individual instructions are written in simpler code. The goal is to offset the need to process more instructions by increasing the speed of each instruction, in particular by implementing an instruction pipeline, which may be simpler given simpler instructions. The key operational concept of the RISC computer is that each instruction performs only one function (e.g. copy a value from memory to a register). The RISC computer usually has many (16 or 32) high-speed, general-purpose registers with a load/store architecture in which the code for the register-register instructions (for performing arithmetic and tests) are separate fr ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Intel I860
The Intel i860 (also known as 80860) is a RISC microprocessor design introduced by Intel in 1989. It is one of Intel's first attempts at an entirely new, high-end instruction set architecture since the failed Intel iAPX 432 from the beginning of the 1980s. It was the world's first million-transistor chip. It was released with considerable fanfare, slightly obscuring the earlier Intel i960, which was successful in some niches of embedded systems, and which many considered to be a better design. The i860 never achieved commercial success and the project was terminated in the mid-1990s. Implementations The first implementation of the i860 architecture is the i860 XR microprocessor (code-named N10), which ran at 25, 33, or 40 MHz. The second-generation i860 XP microprocessor (code named N11) added 4 Mbyte pages, larger on-chip caches, second level cache support, faster buses, and hardware support for bus snooping, for cache consistency in multiprocessor systems. A process ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Bipolar Integrated Technology
Bipolar Integrated Technology was a semiconductor company based in Beaverton, Oregon which sold products implemented with ECL technology. The company was founded in 1983 by former Floating Point Systems, Intel, and Tektronix engineers. The initial product was a Floating point coprocessor chip set. Later, the company produced the B5000 SPARC ECL microprocessor (never reached production in a Sun Microsystems product, though used by Floating Point Systems) and the R6000 MIPS ECL microprocessor (which did reach production as a MIPS minicomputer). The manufacture of these processors were never really reliable, thus making them prohibitively expensive when compared to competing CMOS products. The company entered the telecommunications market with ATM devices and Ethernet switches. The company was eventually acquired by PMC-Sierra PMC-Sierra was a global fabless semiconductor company with offices worldwide that developed and sold semiconductor devices into the storage, commun ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Amdahls Law
In computer architecture, Amdahl's law (or Amdahl's argument) is a formula which gives the theoretical speedup in latency of the execution of a task at fixed workload that can be expected of a system whose resources are improved. It states that "the overall performance improvement gained by optimizing a single part of a system is limited by the fraction of time that the improved part is actually used". It is named after computer scientist Gene Amdahl, and was presented at the American Federation of Information Processing Societies (AFIPS) Spring Joint Computer Conference in 1967. Amdahl's law is often used in parallel computing to predict the theoretical speedup when using multiple processors. For example, if a program needs 20 hours to complete using a single thread, but a one-hour portion of the program cannot be parallelized, therefore only the remaining 19 hours' () execution time can be parallelized, then regardless of how many threads are devoted to a parallelized execution ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
VAX-11/780
The VAX-11 is a discontinued family of 32-bit superminicomputers, running the Virtual Address eXtension (VAX) instruction set architecture (ISA), developed and manufactured by Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC). Development began in 1976. In addition to being powerful machines in their own right, they also offer the additional ability to run user mode PDP-11 code (thus the -11 in VAX-11), offering an upward compatible path for existing customers. The first machine in the series, the VAX-11/780, was announced in October 1977. Its former competitors in the minicomputer space, like Data General and Hewlett-Packard, were unable to successfully respond to the introduction and rapid update of the VAX design. DEC followed the VAX-11/780 with the lower-cost 11/750, and the even lower cost 11/730 and 11/725 models in 1982. More powerful models, initially known as the VAX-11/790 and VAX-11/795, were instead rebranded as the VAX 8600 series. The VAX-11 line was discontinued in 1988, havin ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Photocopier
A photocopier (also called copier or copy machine, and formerly Xerox machine, the generic trademark) is a machine that makes copies of documents and other visual images onto paper or plastic film quickly and cheaply. Most modern photocopiers use a technology called ''xerography'', a dry process that uses electrostatic charges on a light-sensitive photoreceptor to first attract and then transfer toner particles (a powder) onto paper in the form of an image. The toner is then fused onto the paper using heat, pressure, or a combination of both. Copiers can also use other technologies, such as inkjet, but xerography is standard for office copying. Commercial xerographic office photocopying was introduced by Xerox in 1959, and it gradually replaced copies made by Verifax, Photostat, carbon paper, mimeograph machines, and other duplicating machines. Photocopying is widely used in the business, education, and government sectors. While there have been predictions that photocopiers ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
