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Does this mean Be's 8-CPU limitation has become a serious bottleneck?

In article <199510282329.XAA58013@power.globalnews.com>, more
<more@power.globalnews.com> wrote:
>SEQUENT PREVIEWS NON-UNIFORM MEMORY ACCESS SYSTEM
>(October 24th 1995) Sequent Computer Systems Inc has unveiled its
>second generation multiprocessing computer architecture, NUMA-Q. It
>says products using it can be expected in the second half of next
>year. It will be based on Non-Uniform Memory Access and will use
>Intel Corp's Pentium Pro.

>The company says the system will offer ten times the performance of
>current symmetric multiprocessing systems but at prices in keeping
>with the personal computer components it will use. The system's other
>attraction, says the company, is that it offers binary compatibility
>with existing Symmetry servers so Windows NT and Unix will run
>unchanged on it. It says this will give it the edge over massively
>parallel architectures for which programmers have found it difficult
>to develop applications that truly take advantage of the parallelism.
>The first machine is likely to be a 256-processor affair.

>Data General Corp, which is also working on Non Uniform Memory
>Access, is on schedule to beat Sequent to market, but is planning a
>32-way machine.

>Sequent's architecture is the culmination of two years' work in which
>it built a system to use Intel's quad boards. In the machine, each
>processor has its own cache memory and the caches talk to each other
>via IQ-Link to create the illusion of shared system main memory.
>IQ-Link is the intelligent interconnect the company has designed
>which it describes as a "grown up cache controller" and which avoids
>the bottlenecks associated with symmetric multiprocessing. Sequent
>says the system will scale to hundreds of processors, with no visible
>bottleneck and that it provides an easy-to-programme environment.

>The system is neither shared everything, as in symmetric
>multiprocessing, nor shared nothing, as in parallel, but
>'shared-when-you-want'. It can configure itself dynamically under
>software control, says the company.

>The quad boards - symmetric multiprocessing blocks that are
>configured into what is essentially a parallel structure - are
>expected in about nine months. Sequent says that with their launch,
>symmetric multiprocessing on the desktop will become a commodity
>overnight. The boards have been designed by Intel with technological
>input from Sequent, which has tinkered with them, putting the
>on-board memory and input-output closer to each processor so there is
>no need to go out and use bandwidth on the interconnect between the
>quad-processor modules. Around this configuration of boards runs a
>Fibre Channel input-output system that links into every board giving
>each processor direct access to every peripheral attached to the
>system. It is not a backplane, says Sequent, but a daisychain
>connection between quads.
>(C) Computergram International | Select 5000 for more information






































































Hejsan. :)