
Mini-Mainframe at Home: A 6-CPU Server from 1997 - stargrave
http://www.cpushack.com/2020/05/13/chapter-2-mini-mainframe-at-home-the-story-of-a-6-cpu-server-from-1997/
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greendave
I was wondering why it had 6 CPUs (as opposed e.g. to 8). Seems that ALR did
some clever engineering to work around a limitation in the chipset which was
only designed for 4.

> 6x6 is based on the same 450GX chip set (previously known as Orion) as
> competitors' four-CPU offerings. The reason everyone else is shipping four-
> CPU systems is the chip set's 2-bit CPU addressing scheme -- allowing for
> four-CPU IDs. What ALR has done is implement two sets of three CPUs, where
> the missing fourth CPU in each set is actually a stand-in for the other
> entire group. The Pentium Pro's round-robin multitasking approach is
> preserved, and the four-CPU limit is broken.

[1]
[http://www.sandyflat.net/digerati/gatewayalr9000/infoworld%2...](http://www.sandyflat.net/digerati/gatewayalr9000/infoworld%20review/index.htm)

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dfox
Of historical note is that more than 8 socket Opteron servers were implemented
in similar way. There was an chip (IIRC called AMD Horus) that contained two
HyperTransport/CoherentLink controllers connected back to back.

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p_l
It's a standard approach to making bigger systems, as most built-in cache
coherency protocols are optimized for a too-small case. AMD Horus allowed easy
build of 8x8 servers, SGI continued their work from Altix in UltraViolet (now
owned by HPE?) where they used custom cache coherency chips in between,
implementing custom cache directory protocol over NUMAlink connections.

Also, the approach of having "router" and "local area switch" is used in
Infiniband, where local subnets use 16bit ID for endpoints, and 128bit
addresses for inter-subnet routing (the addresses are IPv6 compatible).

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bitwize
ALR!!! I hadn't heard that name in eons. Didn't even know they were still
extant in 1997. Back in the late 80s and early 90s, they were selling some of
the beefiest professional-grade x86 hardware -- workstations and servers --
around. They were among the first (besides Compaq) to ship 386 and 486
hardware and early on the EISA bandwagon too.

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mgarfias
They were \absorbed by Gateway(?!!) at some point there. I remember having to
call them for support on one of these monsters a few times in '98 or so.

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laxd
I'm shure alot of you have seen this already. If not, it's an entertaining 45
minutes
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=45X4VP8CGtk](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=45X4VP8CGtk)
(Here's What Happens When an 18 Year Old Buys a Mainframe)

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purplezooey
Crazy how these things depreciate to basically zero monetary value over time.
Compare that to say, the convenience store on my corner, which is largely
unchanged since the 1970s.

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wnissen
Pretty sure the value is negative. You couldn't just throw them in the trash,
you'd have to pay someone to take them. 350 nm process, which has gone down
almost a factor of 100 by now (apparently 3nm is in prototype), and that's a
linear measurement so it's really more like 10,000. Stunning. A silicon atom
is about .1 nm in diameter, so a factor of 10 is about it for physical
shrinking, definitely not a factor of 100. I hope that we'll be sitting here
in 20 years amazed that petaflop computers drew megawatts of power!

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taborj
When one of my employers closed our site and merged operations with our
Chicago office at the end of 2001, we were left with surplus equipment. Nobody
wanted about 4 giant quad-PPro servers, so I took them. I never did anything
with them and honestly don't remember who made them..we were mainly an HP
shop, so maybe? They sat on rollers on the floor, and came up to about the
bottom of a desktop, and were square boxes maybe 2 ft on a side. I think they
may still be holding up a table at my father's office...

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sometw
Well you have quite the dilemma.

On one hand, they are pieces of vintage hardware.

On the other hand, you may have about 5 grams of gold holding up your father's
table (up to .33g/cpu*16).

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xdxdx
I suppose they could take out just the CPUs for the gold and leave the rest to
hold up the tables.

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sometw
but then you don't have a golden table stand

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proftom
This is almost the right era to say "imagine a Beowulf Cluster of those!"

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svth
Cool, but why the hell would you want to install Windows Vista on it?

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fogus
I haven't kept up with the ALR 6x6 movement since 2002-03 but a the time only
Windows (NT AFAICR) would properly utilize all six of the cores. That may
still be the case.

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icedchai
I remember seeing ads for these in an old Byte magazine. ALR had some high end
stuff...

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teddyh
Probably not vulnerable to Spectre/Meltdown either.

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blattimwind
Uses Pentium Pros -- the first Intel CPUs to be vulnerable.

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teddyh
In that case, I wonder what the chances are for getting a BIOS update?

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electricant
Does it run linux?

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Koshkin
According to the article, it doesn't (not that it couldn't): _Studying such
computational supermachines, I decided to dwell on systems consisting of
Pentium Pro processors, so by installing Windows compatible applications and
benchmarks, one could see how much the performance went ahead over the
decades._

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wnissen
Mini-Mainframe? Isn't that a minicomputer? Am I missing something?

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Koshkin
Just a small computer with the computational power of a full-size mainframe.
(Jargon may confuse, I know.)

