NEC SX-ACE: Quad-core Vector Supercomputing
NEC SX-ACE Processor Prototype – 2013
When Vector computing is mentioned, the first company that comes to mind is Cray. Cray was the leading designer and builder of vector supercomputers since the 1970’s. Vector computing is a bit different then general purpose computing. Simply put, a vector computer is designed to perform an instruction on a large set of data at the same time. Such vector support has been added to x86 (in the form of SSE) as well as the PowerPC architecture (AltiVec) but they were not originally designed as such. Cray however, is not the only such company. In 1983 NEC announced the SX architecture. The SX-1/2 operated at up to 1.3 GFLOPs and supported 256MB of RAM per processor. By 2001 with the SX-5 and SX-6 performance had increased to 8 GFLOPS and supported 8GB of RAM per CPU. For a short while Cray themselves marketed and sold NEC SX computers. Each of the processors, from SX-1 to the SX-9 was a single core processor, but with the SX-ACE, that changed.
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