Convex Computer: Difference between revisions

Revision as of 22:08, 6 December 2003

Revision as of 14:14, 10 January 2004

Line 1:

'''Convex Computer''' was a [[computer]] company that produced a number of "minisupercomputers", [[supercomputer]]s for small to medium-sized businesses. Their later '''Exemplar''' series of [[parallel computing]] machines was based on the [[Hewlett-Packard]] [[PA-RISC]] CPU series, and in 1995 HP bought the company. Exemplar machines were offered for sale by HP for some time.

Convex was formed in [[1982]] by Bob Paluck and Steve Wallach in [[Richardson, Texas]]. Their product concept was not particularly original: they planned on producing a machine very similar in architecture to the [[Cray Research]] [[vector processor]] machines, but with a somewhat lower performance, and at a much lower price-performance point. In order to lower costs, the Convex designs were not as technologically aggressive as Cray's, and were based on more mainstream chip technology, attempting to make up for the loss in performance in other ways.

Their first machine was the '''C1''', released in 1985. The C1 was very similar to the [[Cray-1]] in general design, but used a slower memory and main CPU. They offset this by increasing the capabilities of the vector units, including 128 64-bit registers, double that of the Cray. It also used [[virtual memory]] as opposed to the real memory system of the Cray machines. It was based on [[CMOS]] chips, and generally rated at 20 MFLOPS peak for double precision (64 bits), and 40 MFLOPS peak for single precision (32 bits). They also invested heavily in advanced automatic vectorizing [[compiler]]s in order to gain performance when existing programs were ported to their systems. The machines ran a version of [[Unix]] known as '''ConvexOS'''.