Word: processor
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Mike is a word processor. Hmmmmmm. Click, click, click. Paragraphs from that fellow over there, thoughts from that woman opposite. Phrases from pleasant platitudes past and present. Committee review. Clip and paste. Put this up there, that down here. Reassemble it all in a white plastic machine and then read...
...first, the industry was reluctant to switch to RISC. But the new crop of chips has made believers out of almost everybody. Sun, a company best known for its engineering computers, got into the chip business last summer when it began licensing a RISC processor to AT&T, Unisys and Xerox. MIPS, which introduced its second generation of the chips last month, supplies microprocessors to Tandem, Prime, and Silicon Graphics. Hewlett-Packard has built an entire line of computers around RISC technology...
...also put its prestige and enormous resources behind a radical kind of supercomputer that represents a dramatic break from the past. Since World War II, most computers have been designed to do things one step at a time, moving data in and out of a single high-speed processor. The computer Chen is building with IBM's backing will contain not one but 64 processors, all operating at the same time, in parallel, and thus significantly cutting down computing time. IBM's decision to support a major parallel-processing supercomputer project is a sign that technology is headed in that...
Cray, IBM and AT&T could be upstaged, however, by a determined gang of innovative computer designers who have already moved beyond 64 processing units to build machines that divide their work among hundreds, even thousands of processors. Last week scientists at Sandia National Laboratories in Albuquerque announced that they have coaxed a 1,024-processor computer into solving several problems more than 1,000 times as fast as a single-processor machine acting alone, an unprecedented speedup that suggests the performance of supercomputers may in the future be related almost directly to the number of processors they employ...
Making parallelism work will benefit not just supercomputer users but also those researchers in computer science's other grand project, artificial intelligence. In fact, one of the most advanced parallel machines, a 65,536- processor computer called the Connection Machine, was built by researchers trained at M.I.T.'s Artificial Intelligence Laboratory. W. Daniel Hillis, the 31-year-old engineer who designed the computer, sees in it the first concrete evidence of what he views as an inevitable convergence of the two fields. "Supercomputing is an enabling technology for artificial intelligence," says Hillis. "Just as you couldn't build an airplane...