15 Facts About CDC 6600

CDC 6600 was the flagship of the 6000 series of mainframe computer systems manufactured by Control Data Corporation.

CDC 6600 is on display at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, California.

Things became considerably more tense in 1962 when the new CDC 6600 3600 started to near production quality, and appeared to be exactly what management wanted, when they wanted it.

The CDC 6600 began to take form, with Cray working alongside Jim Thornton, system architect and "hidden genius" of the CDC 6600.

CDC 6600 was three times faster than the previous record-holder, the IBM 7030 Stretch; this alarmed IBM.

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CDC 6600 used a simplified central processor that was designed to run mathematical and logic operations as rapidly as possible, which demanded it be built as small as possible to reduce the length of wiring and the associated signalling delays.

Basis for the CDC 6600 CPU is what would later be called a RISC system, one in which the processor is tuned to do instructions which are comparatively simple and have limited and well-defined access to memory.

The 6600 CPU had multiple functional units which could operate simultaneously, i e, "in parallel", allowing the CPU to overlap instructions' execution times.

The CDC 6600 CPU had an instruction stack, a kind of instruction cache, which helped increase CPU throughput by reducing the amount of CPU idle time caused by waiting for memory to respond to instruction fetch requests.

CDC 6600 CP included ten parallel functional units, allowing multiple instructions to be worked on at the same time.

Floating-point operations were given pride of place in this architecture: the CDC 6600 stand virtually alone in being able to execute a 60-bit floating point multiplication in time comparable to that for a program branch.

The machines originally ran a very simple job-control system known as COS, which was quickly "thrown together" based on the earlier CDC 6600 3000 operating system in order to have something running to test the systems for delivery.

The CDC 6600-sanctioned evolution of COS was undertaken at the Sunnyvale, California software development laboratory.

Unofficial MACE software was later chosen over the official SCOPE product as the basis of the next CDC 6600 operating system, Kronos, named after the Greek god of time.

CDC 6600 7600 was originally intended to be fully compatible with the existing 6000-series machines as well; it started life known as the CDC 6600 6800.