Parallel Systems
Historically, each processing element in earlier parallel systems—like all CPUs of that time—was a serial computer built out of multiple chips. As transistor counts per chip increases, each processing element could be built out of fewer chips, and then later each multi-core processor chip could contain more processing elements.
Goodyear MPP: (1983?) 8 pixel processors per chip, 3,000 to 8,000 transistors per chip.
Brunel University Scape (single-chip array-processing element): (1983) 256 pixel processors per chip, 120,000 to 140,000 transistors per chip.
Cell Broadband Engine: (2006) 9 cores per chip, 234 million transistors per chip.
Read more about this topic: Transistor Count
Famous quotes containing the words parallel and/or systems:
“As I look at the human story I see two stories. They run parallel and never meet. One is of people who live, as they can or must, the events that arrive; the other is of people who live, as they intend, the events they create.”
—Margaret Anderson (1886–1973)
“The skylines lit up at dead of night, the air- conditioning systems cooling empty hotels in the desert and artificial light in the middle of the day all have something both demented and admirable about them. The mindless luxury of a rich civilization, and yet of a civilization perhaps as scared to see the lights go out as was the hunter in his primitive night.”
—Jean Baudrillard (b. 1929)