Products
ETA had only one product, the ETA-10. It was essentially a modernized version of the CDC Cyber-205 computer, and deliberately kept compatibility with it. Like the Cyber series, the ETA-10 did not use vector registers as in the Cray machines, but instead used pipelined memory operations to a high-bandwidth main memory. The basic layout was a shared-memory multiprocessor with up to 8 CPUs (and up to 16 I/O processors), each capable of 4 double-precision or 8 single-precision operations per clock cycle.
The main reason for the ETA-10's speed was the use of a liquid nitrogen cooling in some models to cool the logic components. Even though it was based on then-current CMOS technologies, the cooling allowed the CPUs to operate on a ~7ns cycle, so a fully loaded ETA-10 was capable of about 9.1 GFLOPS. The design goal had been 10 GFLOPS, so the design was technically a failure. Two LN2-cooled models were designated ETA-10E and ETA-10G. Two slower, lower-cost air-cooled versions, the ETA-10Q and ETA-10P (code named "Piper") were also marketed.
The planned follow-on was supposed to be designated ETA-30, as in 30 GFLOPS.
Read more about this topic: ETA Systems
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