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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, in addition to the older Cray-1 compatible 24-bit addressing. The system initially ran the proprietary Cray Operating System (COS), with UniCOS (a UNIX System V derivative) running through the guest Operating System facility. UniCOS became the main OS from 1986 onwards. The Cray X-MP was used for rendering "The Adventures of Andre and Wally B," a short film by the Lucasfilm Computer Graphics Project, which evolved into Pixar Animation Studios. The Cray X-MP was also used for rendering graphics in '' The Last Starfighter ''. 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 . In comparison to modern CPU speeds, the X-MP had less than half of the raw power of Microsoft's Xbox console or less than 8% of an Intel Core 2 Duo E6700 (12.53 Gigaflops ). A 1984 X-MP/48 was about US$ 15 million plus the cost of Disks . IMAGE GALLERY |
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