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DESCRIPTION

in Switzerland .]]
CRAY X-MP/24, on exhibit at the National Cryptologic Museum .]]

The X-MP shared the " access with multiple memory ports per processor.

Cray Research continually enhanced the X-MP over the years. The X-MP/48 (1984) contained 4 cpus with theoretical system peak speed of over 800 megaflops. The X-MP/48 also introduced vector gather/scatter memory reference instructions to the product line. Clock speeds were improved to 8.5 ns (117 MHz), giving a per-cpu peak speed of over 230 MFlops. Memory sizes were also increased over time, culminating in the X-MP/EA series machines (1986) which offered the newer Cray Y-MP 32-bit memory addressing, instead of the older Cray-1 compatible 24-bit addressing.

The system initially ran the proprietary Cray Operating System (COS), with UniCOS (a UNIX System V derivation) running through the guest Operating System facility. UniCOS became the main OS from 1986 onwards.


CONFIGURATIONS

The X-MP was sold with one, two, or four processors and from two to sixteen Mega Word s (16–128  MB ) of word-addressable RAM Main Memory (while initial memory capacity was limited to 16 megawords with a 24-bit address register, the later extended memory architecture XMP/EA raised addressable memory to a theoretical 2 gigawords, in practice the largest memory produced was 64 megawords. The XMP/EA had an 8.5  Nanosecond clock), delivering a theoretical peak speed of 942  Megaflops . A 1984 X-MP/48 was about US$ 15 million plus the cost of Disks .


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