Friday, April 9, 2004

Other News: Stretch. IBM's "Stretch" project was the foundation for modern computers. [MacInTouch] Stretch is often credited as the first "Super Computer" preceding the Cray computer by almost 20 years. Seymour Cray learned his lessons well at Burroughs and took some of IBM's ideas and cooled them in liquid nitrogen so the clock speeds could be out of this world fast. Stretch was water cooled though, so things were running in that general direction. I'm surprised as to how many innovations that one project could encompass. It was the case later on that MIT's Whirlwind which became the basis for NORAD's detection and intercept system also borrowed from Stretch as well. It's good when a few big Pyramid or Sphynx sized projects are tackled by capitalist driven corporations. It helps things jump way forward, instead of the tyranny of Intel baby step incrementalism. Had Stretch really tried stretching even further they would have gone for the Integrated Circuit. That would have been a still bigger jump. But as it turned out the best they could do was to churn out an all transistor architecture. 8:51:47 PM    comment []

Intel readies new dual-processor Itanium 2s. Chips match or exceed existing Madison processor and have larger on-chip cache. [Computerworld News] Funny this comes out the same day Sun announces the demise of the Sparc V architecture. Unfortunate as it may seem Sun is having a hell of time post Internet Bubble Economy. They may have put the dot in '.com', but they aren't capitalizing on it now. No one is buying servers hand over fist to due stupid small things like run RADIUS and LDAP or VPN for a 200 person Internet startup the way they would have done in the past. In the old days, they would have devoted single Sparc CPU boxes to DNS and DHCP en masse. Not anymore however, all the failed companies sold off their boxes at steep discounts and everyone pounced on them. Universities especially loved the dot com bubble burst because it meant they could hoover up all the big expensive gear they couldn't afford even with their considerably large academic discounts. 8:47:20 PM    comment []

Sun to drop UltraSparc V in favor of Rock processor. Sun Microsystems will drop the UltraSparc V from its road map in favor of its Rock processor, signaling a shift in the strategic direction of the company's processor division. [Computerworld News] I know Ivan Sutherland has been doing research for Sun on Asynchronous CPU architectures. I hope this recent announcement hasn't derailed that effort, and that the Rock and Gemini Processors are the direct offshoots of Ivan's work at Sun. If that's the case Sun will remain competitive with IBM and Intel on the CPU front. However the timing of this seems to have coincided with the layoff announcement and the Microsoft settlement and the Intel announcement of new dual core Itanium CPU's. Too many coincidences here I think. 8:44:18 PM    comment []