History
The first member of the CDC 6000 series was the first supercomputer CDC 6600, designed by Seymour Cray and James E. Thornton in Chippewa Falls, Wisconsin. It was introduced in September 1964 and performed up to three million instructions per second, three times faster than the IBM Stretch, the speed champ for the previous couple of years. It remained the fastest machine for five years until the CDC 7600 was launched. The machine was Freon refrigerant cooled. Control Data manufactured about 100 machines of this type, selling for $6 to $10 million each.
The next system to be introduced was the CDC 6400, delivered in April 1966. The 6400 central processor was a slower, less expensive, implementation with serial processing, rather than the 6600s parallel functional units. All other aspects of the 6400 were identical to the 6600. Then followed a machine with dual 6400-style central processors, the CDC 6500, designed principally by James E. Thornton, in October 1967. And finally, the CDC 6700, with both a 6600-style CPU and a 6400-style CPU, was released in October 1969.
Subsequent modifications to the series in 1969 included the extension to 20 peripheral and control processors with 24 channels. (A 30-PPU 6600 machine was operated by Control Data's Software Research Lab during 1971-1973, but this version was never sold commercially.) Control Data also marketed a CDC 6400 with a smaller number of peripheral processors, the CDC 6415-7 with seven peripheral processors to reduce cost.
Read more about this topic: CDC 6000 Series
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