Vector processor - Vector processor A vector processor, or array processor, is a CPU design that is able to run mathematical operations on a large number of data elements very quickly. This is in contrast to a scalar processor which handles one element at a time – the vast majority of CPUs are scalar (or close to it). Vector processors were common in the scientific computing area, where they formed the basis of most supercomputers through the 1980s and into the 1990s, but general increases in performance and processor design have since made the dedicated vector processor a thing of the past. History The first successful implementations of a vector processor appears to be the CDC Cyber 100 and the Texas Instruments Advanced Scientific Computer. The Cyber was otherwise.
KOffice - under open source licenses. KOffice includes the following components: KWord. A word processor with style sheets and frame-support for DTP-style editing of complex layouts. KSpread. A spreadsheet application with multiple sheet support, templates and more than 100 mathematicalal formulas. KPresenter. A presentation program with image and effect support. Kivio. A programmable flowchart drawing program with dynamically loadable stencils. Developed by theKompany, which offers additional (copyrighted) stencils for sale. Karbon14. A vector drawing application with a variety of drawing and editing tools. Krita (formerly known as Krayon and KImageshop). A bitmap graphics manipulation program, primarily designed as a painting program, with some image processing features. Kugar and KChart. Integrated report and chart generators. KFormula. An integrated mathematical formula editor. Kexi. An integrated environment for managing data. It helps creating database schemas, inserting,.
G4 - to the design being the "fourth generation" of PowerPC's from Motorola. IBM, the third member of the AIM (Apple Computer, IBM and Motorola) consortium, chose not to participate in the design of the G4 in part owing to microprocessor design philosophy disagreements concerning a Vector Processing Unit on the chip. Ultimately, the G4 architecture design contained a 128-bit vector processing unit called AltiVec (also known as "Velocity Engine" in Apple's marketing literature). With the AltiVec unit, the G4 microprocessor can do four-way single precision floating point math, or 16-way byte math in a single cycle. Furthermore, the vector processing unit on the G4 is superscalar, and can do two vector operations at the same time. Compared to x86 microprocessors at the time, this feature offered a substantial performance boost -- if.
Unit - unit of money (a monetary unit). In mathematics, 'unit' often refers to the number one in some sense: A unit vector is a vector with length 1. The unit circle is the cirle with radius 1 centered at the origin of the coordinate system. The unit interval is the interval of all real numbers between 0 and 1. The imaginary unit of complex numbers is the number i, a number whose square is -1. A root of unity is a complex number a power of which is 1. A unit of a ring is an element of the ring that is invertible with respect to the ring multiplication. In science and engineering, 'unit' refers to the form of measurement of a quantity. These systems are typically characterized by the units chosen.
GNOME Office - Office is an Office applications suite: Abiword word processor the Gnumeric spreadsheet Galeon, a web browser Gfax, sends and receives faxes Sodipodi and Sketch, vector drawing packages The GIMP an image editing program Eye Of GNOME, an image viewer Balsa, an email client Ximian Evolution, an email/groupware client Dia diagramming tool Guppi, a plotting and graphing program. MrProject and Toutdoux, project management tools GnuCash, a personal finance manager Agnubis, a presentation program. GNOME-DB, software that provides database connectivity. The integration between the various applications in the suite is rather loose, and therefore many consider GNOME Office to be merely the collection of desktop productivity applications written for the GNOME environment rather than an office suite in the usual sense. Integration is achieved chiefly through the Bonobo component technology. GNOME Office is.
GRASS programming language - the original "attacking the death star will not be easy" animation in Star Wars. History The original version of GRASS was developed by Tom DeFanti for his 1974 Ohio State University Ph.D. thesis. It was developed on a PDP-11/45 driving a Vector General 3DR display, and as the name implies, this was a purely vector graphics machine. GRASS included a number of vector-drawing commands, and could organize collections of them into a hierarchy, applying the various animation effects to whole "trees" of the image at once. It was this version that was used for the Star Wars animation, if you re-watch this portion of the film you can see whole trees popping into the image at various times. After graduation he moved to the University of Illinois, Chicago Circle. There he.
Adobe Systems - manufacturers, not sold to end users) was digital fonts. In 1996, the company announced the OpenType font format, jointly with Microsoft, and in 2002-03 Adobe completed the conversion of its library of Type 1 fonts to the new format. In the mid-80s, soon after introducing PostScript, Adobe entered the consumer software market by introducing Adobe Illustrator, a vector-based drawing program for the Apple Macintosh. This was the logical outgrowth of commercializing their in-house font-development software and to help popularize the use of laser printers. Unlike MacDraw (the standard vector-based drawing program for the Mac), Illustrator described all shapes with the more flexible Bézier curve, and provided a level of accuracy sorely missing. Font rendering in Illustrator, however, was left to the Macintosh's QuickDraw routines and would not be superseded by a.
Advanced Scientific Computer - was a computer made by Texas Instruments. This Supercomputer used a vector processor chip to run..
Alliant Computer Systems - the FX/1, FX/2 and FX/4. Alliant machines were fairly small, the FX/1 was about the size of a large full-height FX, while the FX/4 was smaller than a VAX 11/750, about the size of a large photocopier. A second series of FX machines included more custom hardware known as Advanced Computational Elements (ACE). The Weitek FPUs were replaced by their own design known as the BIT, which included a custom vector processor with 32 64-bit elements, and 8 64-bit scalar floating point, 8 32-bit integer, and 8 32-bit address registers. These were used in the FX/40, FX/80 and VFX machines. The FX/2800 series replaced the CE/ACEs and IPs with modules based on the Intel i860 RISC chip. The i860 was an early superscallar CPU that allowed the programmer access directly into.
Ardent - machines, but eventually shut down completely in February 1995. Ardent started as Dana Computer in November 1985 in Silicon Valley. Their aim was to produce a desktiop supercomputer dedicated to graphics, parallel computing machines that could support up to four processor units. Each processor unit consisted of a MIPS R3000 CPU connected to a custom vector processor. The vector unit held a whopping 8,192 64-bit registers that could be used in any way from 8192 1-word to 32 256-word registers. This compares to modern SIMD systems which allow for perhaps eight to sixteen 128-bit registers with a small variety of addressing schemes. After learning that the name Dana was already in use by a local disk drive company, they became Ardent. Their business plan called for their Titan system to outperform.
X86 assembly language - real mode 3..5 Example code 4 Protected Mode x86 PC assembly tutorial This is a tutorial, not a complete scientific description of how the x86 processor works. This text is intended for those who want to gain a insight into programming real assembly language. Because the x86 processors are so common, most of you should be able to assemble most of the code that you find in this tutorial at your own computer. This tutorial uses standard Intel syntax, not AT&T syntax in which most Linux assembly programs is written. All the code in this tutorial is intended for ordinary PC computers! If you want to assemble the code you find in here you will have to download the free netwide assembler (NASM). Download it from this webpage: http://nasm.sourceforge.net/ Read about.
Computer software - a single program, such as an image viewer; a small collection of programs (often called a software package) that work closely together to accomplish a task, such as a spreadsheet or text processing system; a larger collection (often called a software suite) of related but independent programs and packages that have a common user interface or shared data format, such as Microsoft Office, which consists of closely integrated word processor, spreadsheet, database, etc.; or a software system, such as a database management system, which is a collection of fundamental programs that may provide some service to a variety of other independent applications. Software creation Software is created with programming languages and related utilities, which may come in several of the above forms: single programs like script interpreterss, packages containing a compiler,.
Compiler optimization - (the number of instructions completed per time period, usually an integer multiple of the clock cycle) is usually constant in cases where memory latency is not a factor. There may be several ways of carrying out a certain task, with CISC usually offering more alternatives than RISC. Compilers have to know the relative costs among the various instructions and choose the best instruction sequence (see instruction selection). Pipeliness: A pipeline is essentially an ALU broken up into an assembly line. It allows use of parts of the ALU for different instructions by breaking up the execution of instructions into various stages: instruction decode, address decode, memory fetch, register fetch, compute, register store, etc. One instruction could be in the register store stage, while another could be in the register fetch stage..
Computer painting - CorelDraw (vector based) Photoshop (image based) GIMP (image based) The word processor Microsoft Word comes with a set of very simple vector graphics tools that can be used to make simple diagrams to spice up a wikipedia article. See How to draw a diagram with Microsoft Word for a tutorial..
Control Data Corporation - corporate prodding, at which point nothing happened. ASCC was eventually cancelled in 1969 after producing nothing, and 190 of the 200 employees stayed on the coast rather than suffer being recalled to IBM in New York. But in the short term IBM also went ahead and announced a new version of the famed System/360 that would be just as fast as the 6600. This machine didn't exist, but that didn't stop sales of the 6600 drying up while people waited for its release – a tactic known today as FUD and more commonly associated with Microsoft. Norris didn't take this lying down, and a year later filed an anti-trust suit against IBM, eventually winning over 600 million dollars and picking up several parts of IBM's empire in the process. The same.
Convex Computer - 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 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.
Cray X-MP - designed, built and sold by Cray Research. The company's first parallel vector processor machine, it was the 1982 successor to the Cray-1 and a fourth generation machine. The principal designer was Steve Chen. The X-MP shared the 'horseshoe' design of the earlier machine. The processors ran on a 8.5 ns clock compared to 12.5 ns for the Cray-1A, delivering around 55 MFLOPS per processor and 235 MFLOPS for the four processor 1982 machine. The processors also had better chaining support, parallel arithmetic pipes, and shared memory access with multiple pipelines per processor. The system initially ran COS with UniCOS (a System V derivation) running through the guest operating system facility. Unicos became the main OS from 1984. The X-MP was sold with one, two or four processors and from one to.
Timeline of computing 1950-1979 - were much more flexible in their applications. 1959 COBOL (COmmon Business-Orientated Language) developed by Grace Murray Hopper as the successor to FLOW-MATIC, finished in 1961. 1959 Minsk mainframe computer development and production started in the USSR. Stopped in 1975. 1960 Algol - first structured, procedural, programming language to be released. 1960 Compiler compiler - The first compiler compiler is released. 1960 Tandy Corporation founded by Charles Tandy. 1961 APL programming language released by Kenneth Iverson at IBM. 1962 ATLAS is completed by the University of Manchester team. This machine introduced many modern architectural concepts: spooling, interrupts, pipelining, interleaved memory, virtual memory and paging. It was the most powerful machine in the world at the time of release. 1962 Space War, the first computer game is written by a MIT student named.
Time slice multiplexing - modern processors. On Intel machines this is usually keyed to the Non-Maskeable Interrupt (NMI) INT0. When the timer expires it causes an exception, which forces the processor to push the processor state to the stack and begin executing the instructions pointed to by the interrupt vector table entry for INT0. This usually points to the kernel, which then switches the stack pointer to point to the stack fo the next thread to be executed and executes an IRET, or return from interrupt. The IRET causes the processor to pop the processor status from the stack and resume execution..
SIMD - computing term that refers to a set of operations for efficiently handling large quantities of data in parallel, as in a vector processor or array processor. First popularized in large-scale supercomputers (as opposed to MIMD parallelization), smaller-scale SIMD operations have now become widespread in personal computer hardware. An example of an application that can take advantage of SIMD is one where the same value is being added to a large number of data points, a common operation in many multimedia application. One example would be changing the brightness of an image. Each pixel of an image consists of three 8-bit values for the brightness of the red, green and blue portions of the color. To change the brightness, the R G and B values are read from memory, a value is.
