[Info-vax] TRON and Foonly [was Re: The attempts to keep Linux on Itanium (attempt number 0x7fff_ffff)]

[Rich Alderson]

Single Stage to Orbit <alex.buell at munted.eu> writes:

> BTW, I found out recently, that they used the Super Foonly F1 (a
> supercharged PDP-10 no less) to render the CGI for the film TRON!

Supercharged with respect to a 1967 PDP-10 (KA-10 CPU) or 1971 DECsystem-10
(KI-10 CPU).  The F1 is approximately the same processing power as a 1974 KL-10
CPU (DECsystem-1080, DECSYSTEM-2040).

The Systems Concepts SC-40 was the only truly supercharged PDP-10, with a
floating point accelerator that gave roughly 10x performance for FP operations.
For everything else, the SC boxes and the XKL Toad-1 and TOAD-2 systems provide
2x to 2.5x processing power over the KL-10.

-- 
Rich Alderson					  news at alderson.users.panix.com
      Audendum est, et veritas investiganda; quam etiamsi non assequamur,
	  omnino tamen proprius, quam nunc sumus, ad eam perveniemus.
									--Galen