VLIW pre-history
|
From: Jonathan Thornburg -- remove -animal to reply on 20 May 2007 10:11 In comp.arch Nick Maclaren <nmm1(a)cus.cam.ac.uk> wrote: > In article <dlP3i.16047$p47.5679(a)bgtnsc04-news.ops.worldnet.att.net>, > Stephen Fuld <S.Fuld(a)PleaseRemove.att.net> writes: > |> Eugene Miya wrote: > |> > |> > Pipelining goes back to 1964 in my biblio alone, but there are > |> > subtle terminology distnctions between all the different ways > |> > people use it (ask how errors propagate backward, that's a good first > |> > order question). The ATLAS (http://www.computer50.org/kgill/atlas/atlas.html) was a pipelined machine, shipping in 1962. > |> I thought that pipelining went back at least to Richard Feynman's use of > |> pipelining his "computers", the human kind, in the work on the Manhattan > |> Project. :-) > > As an industrial technique, it is not later than mediaeval. In computing, > the word seems to date from the mid-1960s, though the technique is older. > It was often just lumped in with other forms of instruction scheduling. Nick is right. As an industrial technique ("the assembly line"), it was already well-established when Adam Smith wrote "An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations" (published in 1776). Smith described a pipelined assembly line for making pins: "One man draws out the wire, another straights [sic] it, a third cuts it, a fourth points it, a fifth grinds it at the top for receiving the head; to make the head requires two or three distinct operations; to put it on, is a peculiar business, to whiten the pins is another; it is even a trade by itself to put them into the paper." The OED dates the term "pipe-line" to 1883, referring to both oil and water lines. ciao, -- -- Jonathan Thornburg (remove -animal to reply) <J.Thornburg(a)soton.ac-zebra.uk> School of Mathematics, U of Southampton, England "Washing one's hands of the conflict between the powerful and the powerless means to side with the powerful, not to be neutral." -- quote by Freire / poster by Oxfam
From: Anne & Lynn Wheeler on 20 May 2007 10:30 "Jonathan Thornburg -- remove -animal to reply" <J.Thornburg(a)soton.ac-zebra.uk> writes: > The OED dates the term "pipe-line" to 1883, referring to both oil and > water lines. current day natural gas appears to have quite a bit of pipelinning .... including multiple day latency ... lots of weather modeling. if they don't start pumping in more gas, days before a cold snap ... they can have inadequate gas at the consumer end. if they are wrong and the cold snap doesn't occur ... they can have (over) pressure problems at the consumer end (infrastructure with pipelines stretching hundreds of miles from origin to destination). most consumer water lines don't have quite the same long haul supply distances (any long haul typically having lots of intermediary staging areas).
From: mike on 20 May 2007 13:51 "Anne & Lynn Wheeler" <lynn(a)garlic.com> wrote in message news:m3fy5r5zzr.fsf(a)garlic.com... | | "Jonathan Thornburg -- remove -animal to reply" | <J.Thornburg(a)soton.ac-zebra.uk> writes: | > The OED dates the term "pipe-line" to 1883, referring to both oil and | > water lines. | | current day natural gas appears to have quite a bit of pipelinning | ... including multiple day latency ... lots of weather modeling. if they | don't start pumping in more gas, days before a cold snap ... they can | have inadequate gas at the consumer end. if they are wrong and the cold | snap doesn't occur ... they can have (over) pressure problems at the | consumer end (infrastructure with pipelines stretching hundreds of miles | from origin to destination). | | most consumer water lines don't have quite the same long haul supply | distances (any long haul typically having lots of intermediary staging | areas). Further, unlike water, gas is compressible.
From: Mark Smotherman on 20 May 2007 23:12 "Jonathan Thornburg -- remove -animal to reply" <J.Thornburg(a)soton.ac-zebra.uk> writes: > >In comp.arch Nick Maclaren <nmm1(a)cus.cam.ac.uk> wrote: >> In article <dlP3i.16047$p47.5679(a)bgtnsc04-news.ops.worldnet.att.net>, >> Stephen Fuld <S.Fuld(a)PleaseRemove.att.net> writes: >> |> Eugene Miya wrote: >> |> >> |> > Pipelining goes back to 1964 in my biblio alone, but there are >> |> > subtle terminology distnctions between all the different ways >> |> > people use it (ask how errors propagate backward, that's a good first >> |> > order question). > >The ATLAS (http://www.computer50.org/kgill/atlas/atlas.html) was a >pipelined machine, shipping in 1962. other early pipelines: The Zuse Z3 (1941, patent filed in 1949) was pipelined: http://irb.cs.tu-berlin.de/~zuse/Konrad_Zuse/Z3-detail.htm Gene Amdahl's WISC (1950) had a four-stage pipeline - instruction fetch, operand fetch, execution, write back: http://www.cs.wisc.edu/~bezenek/Stuff/amdahl_thesis.pdf and the IBM Stretch and Univac LARC (projects started mid-1950s) were pipelined.
From: Quadibloc on 21 May 2007 00:55
Mark Smotherman wrote: > and the IBM Stretch and Univac LARC (projects started mid-1950s) > were pipelined. .. It should be noted that, yes, the IBM Stretch was an early superpipelined machine. The failure of its pipelining to provide the expected performance gains was the reason behind IBM cutting the price and discontinuing the sale of that machine. But as for pipelining per se, comparable to the earliest pipelined machines, that was a feature even of the IBM 7094. It's interesting to note that pipelining flushes were still a problem with the IBM System/360 Model 91; while the discrepancy wasn't as severe as with the STRETCH, IBM was still disappointed with the performance gains that superpipelining (that is, pipelining the execution portion of the instruction) provided. On the other hand, with the Model 85 and cache, IBM ended up pleasantly surprised. John Savard |