Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!uflorida!gatech!mcnc!duke!romeo!jab
From: jab@romeo.cs.duke.edu (John A. Board)
Newsgroups: comp.arch
Subject: 20 Gflop NEC machine
Keywords: Vector supercomputer NEC
Message-ID: <14173@duke.cs.duke.edu>
Date: 12 Apr 89 03:38:02 GMT
Sender: news@duke.cs.duke.edu
Lines: 22

I read it in the _Durham Morning Herald_ so it must be true....  
NEC has apparently announced the "SX-X" series with peak
vector speeds of 20 Gflop.  Story says NEC plans shipments for 
July-September 1990, head-to-head with the early Cray-3 shipments.

Does anyone know anything about this beast?  Earlier NEC supers 
(in the 1-3 Gflop class) have been based around multiple identical vector
functional units sharing a common vector register set.  Have they gone
to multiple independent or quasi-independent processors for this one?

The "knowledgable industry analyst" says "US commercial and government
customers may feel they have no choice but to buy the Japanese machine
[instead of a Cray]" - any comments?

The AP story goes on to define a Floating Point Operation as a
"high precision calculation on rows and columns of numbers". Sigh.


John Board                                   INET: jab@dukee.egr.duke.edu
Assistant Professor                             or jab@duke.cs.duke.edu
Dept. Electrical Eng'g and                   UUCP: ...!mcnc!duke!jab
Dept. Computer Science                       BITNET: DBOARD@TUCC