I like it how the creators of that Cray documentary labeled the cache chips with the $ sign.

In the early 90s, when I was at Georgia Tech, I was so excited to get time to run jobs on a Cray Y-MP. It was a completely different world from the 68030 Macs and 386 PCs we used daily. Now I work with supercomputers made up of Commodity Intel servers, Infiniband, GPUs and insane amounts of Flash storage. A bit of the mystery has been lost over the years, but I get to play with big computers every day!

@videosuperhighway7655

5 ай бұрын

Its more like Supercomputers became the commodity. Now everyone has Cray at home. His idea’s eventually ended up on commodity processors ie AVX2 etc… just like when 3D only existed on very expensive technical UNIX workstations by SGI,SUN etc…. Now every PC ships with 3D hardware, Vector processors etc…. Quantum computing is really now the next level.

Worked on GaAs MCM ASICs for satellite comms back in 1997. By far the most advanced tech/lowest volume/highest cost engineering I ever worked on in my career.

Now that's something special. As a kid I used to love looking up information and pictures of Cray's supercomputers, they knew the value in making everything they did look like alien technology! I remember in the late 90s some extreme overclockers were playing with entire systems bathed in DIY chilled fluorinert baths too, undoubtedly inspired by systems like the X1.

@brokeandtired

Жыл бұрын

I remember in the 1980's as a kid, Cray were talked of in hush tones = to computing witchcraft. Everyone knew their name at my school.

@somedutchguy7582

Жыл бұрын

The fluorinert bath was more likely inspired by the Cray-2, I think. Seymour Cray himself lovingly called that thing "my computer in an aquarium".

IIRC the Cray 3 processor was an approximately 1 foot cube and drew 88kw. It's nice to see that, at 560 watts, they got their power situation under control. :)

@charliefoxtrot5001

2 ай бұрын

That's 560 Watt per module! Supercomputers have been using more and more power. 20MW is the top range these days.

@hessex1899

2 ай бұрын

@@charliefoxtrot5001 Yes but that's racks and racks of hardware. Not a 1 foot cube of GaAs in a bath tub of coolant.

@charliefoxtrot5001

2 ай бұрын

@@hessex1899 You can't make a processor-to-processor comparison, as the Cray-3 came with up to 16 processors, the Cray X1 came with up to 4,096 processors, and the latest HPE Cray XE comes with up to 37,888 GPUs. The drive to more and more processors is a fact of the end of custom-designed vector processors, the end of Dennard scaling, and the end of Moore's law. A 4-processor Cray 3 had 88 kW of power consumption. A 16-processor version would have had 352 kW. A 4,096-processor Cray X1 would be 2,3 MW just for the processor modules, not considering the rest! The HPE Cray XE with its 37,888 GPUs consumes ~20 MW in 74 racks. That's 270 kW per rack with 480 V feeds. That's the power consumption of 12 Cray 3 processors per rack! Subversive cooling still exists, but is considered to be problematic from a maintenance point of view. Modern systems are warm water cooled for energy efficiency. PS: Understand that 1 MW of power consumption is a power bill of about $1M per year. Power consumption and power density is a huge problem. PPS: The Aurora system is rumored to be 60MW!

@fungo6631

8 күн бұрын

​@@charliefoxtrot5001Apparently they even use that waste heat to provide hot water.

@charliefoxtrot5001

8 күн бұрын

@@fungo6631 To a certain degree, yes. There are several supercomputer centers around the world that use the waste heat for the regulating temperatures in office buildings and the warm water supply. I have recently seen even a thermoelectric generator that converts waste heat to electricity.

WOW! Obtaining a bare ceramic substrate, unpopulated (as in actually un-populated, rather than de-populated [i don't see any solder remnants, it's all pristine gold pads]) is quite rare!

@ByWire-yk8eh

Жыл бұрын

Those pads are on the connector side. They impinge on spring loaded pins. I've swapped a bunch of these modules in engineering test.

Really incredible to get to see these kinds of systems, thank you for preserving and sharing the history of these machines.

I had the honour to work for and with Seymour Cray 1996 working on the Cray 4 Lawrence Livermour Labs (unfortunately the project was defunded when we didn't make the deadline). He died in an unfortunate accident in October 1996.

I could watch cpu teardowns all day... so fascinating.

Thanks for sharing more rare and obscure parts of your collection with us.

I really enjoy how much you really love the old technology & the old chips. We can tell you really love what you do. The sound of your voice really transfers your joy for the technology.

Fantastic collection, a true historical presentation of technology development. Thank You for preserving and sharing the knowledge.

What a beautiful device. There was always something special about Cray machines, especially those early systems designed by Seymour Cray himself. Always remember a lecture at college about the design of a big CDC machine. Rather tongue in cheek, 'The designer got fed up with creating such piddling small machines, so went off to form Cray' What I didn’t realise at the time was that the lecturer had been involved in creating (what we’d now call) the OS for the Manchester/Ferranti Atlas, often called the first supercomputer… so I guess he knew what it meant to create high performance systems.

WOW, that was amazing and the spray cooling solution blew my mind. Might try that with my 13900KS, don't think the wife would mind the garden hose running through the house. 🤣

6:27 how did he read my mind? I just want to type "but can it run doom" and now I completely speechless

Excellent video! Thank you for preserving rare chips like this.

A beautiful piece of engineering, I used to read about CRAY computers in some old magazines my dad had, but it's pretty cool to see the actual thing.

Thanks for all your hard work on this Peter

"no, it doesn't run doom" they'll find a way. if they found a way to run doom on a vic-20, they'll do it on this too

@CPUGalaxy

Жыл бұрын

😅👍🏻👍🏻

Wonderful show Peter. Another triumph in the CPU Galaxy ❤️❤️👍👍👍

wow amazing stuff, great collection of rare chips there.

Very impressive! :> Congratulations!

Thanks Peter! Awesome piece of computer history! Maybe one day you can get something like a dual 386 working and overclock it? Like the Compaq SystemPro. ;-) Would be awesome!

Amazing video! I'd love more of this.

fascinating look at the extreme over-clocking and liquid cooling of the cray super-computers. testament to a man who's legacy defined performance computing. ✨

Absolutely amazing!

A lot of people thought AMD was the first company to do MCM, not quite. AMD does employ some former Cray engineers so it makes sense that they would have in house expertise in developing their line of multi package products. Also, if I recall correctly, the coolant used was a variant of 3M's Novec which is still being used for cooling solutions today.

Жыл бұрын

Idk who did MCM first, IBM sure had MCM's, There are even 16bit CPU's used in Minicomputers that are MCM, Curious Mark has a HP machine with that. "Chiplet" is some form of MCM but I guess today its moved on to more affordable materials, NAVI3 uses some plastic material that the mobile market developed for Phone SoC's. But yea "chiplets" are in my amateur view just MCM made cheap. And if chiplets is just chips connected then even intel have done that with the Core2 Quad, they even got crap for it when AMD went monolitic qith the Phenom's Quad cores. But as fare as i know the Core 2 Quad shared FSB so probably very few interconnects between dies. In the end I guess MCM and Chiplets offer a lot more Interconnects then just adding two chips in a package, doing the thousands of connections is the hard part it seems. AMD sad so them selfs and thats why there NAVI3 is divided the way it is because breaking out the MC was possible due to lower interconnect count while they claimed two GPU dies could not be connected with todays Chiplet Tech. But the odd thing is that AMD do have dual GPU in one package for well Super computers so that is a bit a odds with there own claims, also Apple do merge two SoC's with some serious interconnect for there M1 Ultra is it? Anyways MCM's in some form seems to be as old as the IC itself because someone was never happy with the max transistor count on a die they could get XD

@smakfu1375

Жыл бұрын

What are you babbling about?! I really hate it when people cast some wide-net “a lot of people” style statement when nobody with any history in this business thinks AMD was even remotely the first to do MCM/MCP. Hell, if just watch this channel you know that’s pure nonsense. Now go educate yourself on the subject: en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multi-chip_module

@ironhead2008

Жыл бұрын

Some of the Netburst based Pentium D cpus (specifically Presler cores) were MCM modules, basically 2 Cedar Mill CPUs together on the same substrate. The earlier Smithfield cores were 2 unconnected Prescott cores on the same die.

Жыл бұрын

@@ironhead2008 Going back even the Pentium PRO was a form of MCM because the L2 cache was its own die on a ceramic package. But yea one can go back even more so MCM is old tech but dam cool.

@cyklondx

Жыл бұрын

Lisa actually came from IBM - she was one of the former Cray engineer.

Great Video. Good explanation. And of course outstanding design 👍

Another fantastic piece of computing! Thanks again for this kind of videos. Also, maybe it can not run Crysis or Doom but it can run Bad Apple.

First time seeing your content, sub well earned.

Hail from Wisconsin. Used to live a few miles from Cray and worked at one of the ex-factories for a while making PCB's for crazy stuff.

I remember being at Dream hack back when this machine was coming out in the early 2000's (idk if it was out yet). People shared the Video clips you linked but we had a higher Quality version that Cray sadly took down from there site and I cant find it on Internet Archives. I think the only way to get it today would be to ask Cray for it but I would love to have that original video file again because you can see the details so much better then on the YT uploads that exists today that are compressed to hell and back. Anyways lets watch some Cray PRON and Im happy your back again!

Жыл бұрын

Hum I did find the video on internet archive but not sure its exactly the version I had. Will email you the link just in case you want it untouched.

@CPUGalaxy

Жыл бұрын

yes. I would appreciate that a lot!! I was searching in the internet archive already but could not find it so far. Thanks for sending me the link!

@churblefurbles

Жыл бұрын

can you link it on here?

0:27 you have more cpu's in your collection than stars in the galaxy

@CPUGalaxy

Жыл бұрын

well, therefore CPUGALAXY 😅

@Okurka.

Жыл бұрын

There are over 100 billion stars in the Milky Way galaxy.

Can run Doom, as there likely is an emulator that can, using a fraction of the one core only, emulate a 486DX2 CPU entirely in software, complete with all the translation needed to interface to the Cray display interface.

@charliefoxtrot5001

2 ай бұрын

No! These are vector processors, designed for linear algebra computations. Oh, and the "Cray display interface" is a command line shell.

Wow this was so ahead of its time

Oh boy. I remember seeing the Cray video showing the engineering of the X1 (then known as the SV2) and they went over this assembly. It's always been peak exotica to me. I love this engineering

@AntneeUK

5 ай бұрын

No sooner do I comment that than you mention said video 😂 I love that the video is still available. I watched it from the Cray website itself all those years ago

Awesome, love it!

Very interesting cooling, I never heard about such cooling before.

@ByWire-yk8eh

Жыл бұрын

IBM had 100/118 chip MCM's in the 308X (S/390) series circa 1980. The first cooling attempt was liquid fluorocarbon swirling around the chips, but this rotted the chips. They finally decided on little aluminum pistons touching the back of the chips and used helium to better conduct the heat.

nice job on the video Peter!

Great to see those MCM's upclose

Thanks for the link to the Cray lecture Peter, super interesting. What a great addition to the collection. I wonder how many folks in the world have a collection as extensive as yours, it has to be a really exclusive club now.

@CPUGalaxy

Жыл бұрын

yeah, I like the Cray lecture a lot! Watched it already several times. Well, yeah, my collection is pretty mature already. I just feel a bit sad for younger ppl who are starting with their collection. Things are getting so rare already. I am glad that I got the chances in the past to save so many unique parts from scrapping.

@spladam3845

Жыл бұрын

@@CPUGalaxy Me too. Thank you for sharing it with us.

@spladam3845

Жыл бұрын

@@CPUGalaxy I just finished the lecture video, it was interesting and a bit sad, seeing him talk up the Cray 3 and Gallium Arsenide knowing the 3 is going to fail, and the industry is already in the process of abandoning GA for silicon outside of discreet industrial logic. The other team had been outperforming his team for a while, and the 3 was about to be spun off into it's own company and... well you know. Well respected and admired by his peers, but being left behind by the new guys. If only he could have lived to see vector super computers in the GPU of desktop PCs and phones.

Peter, du machst das Klasse. Dank dir für all deine Videos.

your show case of older CPUs is the reason I stay on YT.

@CPUGalaxy

Жыл бұрын

thank you 🙏🏻

Thank you! Really enjoyed this 🤓

wow! brings back some crazy memories!! I remember reading the publicity folder 4 this chipset!! these systems were so expensive. all U need now, is a good meal with wine. but don't forget that sunset ride in the saab!! cheers!

My God, this retro channel is too retro... well done!

A fascinating video. I would love to have a collection like that. I have started collecting interesting CPUs such as Alpha and Itanium, but it's nowhere you what you have

Many thanks sharing this video with us!

@CPUGalaxy

Жыл бұрын

my community is my inspiration 💛

Love your videos. And your accent is so good!

@CPUGalaxy

Жыл бұрын

haha, thank you. No matter what I try, I can’t get rid of my Austrian 🇦🇹 accent 😅

@tommyovesen

Жыл бұрын

@@CPUGalaxy It's excellent! No need to change!

YEAH!!! NEW VIDEO!!! finally! Love your channel!!! RETRO PC FOREVER!

I enjoyed. Thanks

I used to work for SGI who bought Cray in the early 90's. Spent a lot of time in, as we say it Chipmunk Falls. Seymore was killed in a car crash South of Denver, CO.

Interesting processor. Thanks for share all those magnificents old part! Now joking a bit: Will it run Doom???

This MCM is profoundly cool!

Something really special!!!

rambus, nice Cray is legendary and this processor shows why! >500w talk about fire breathing!

*IM NOT INTO THIS STUFF* but that was fascinating and your collection I hope one day is in a museum...!!!

Awesome stuff, and it blows my mind in some ways to think how far we have come since 2003, and that the sub $200 Nokia T20 Android tablet that i'm, watching this video on, is more powerful in many ways with it's 8 cores, while using much much less power, but the Cray X1 is still very impressive, and I'm sure a cluster of them at full speed would put my tablet to shame lol!

What a beast!

Great video!

nothing new under the sun, striking resemblance to modern MCM with a lot more chunkiness :0

piece of art

Mr. Cray was a bloody wizard. He was one of very few persons in his time who really understood how Amdahl's law had to be followed in order to design the best computers.

Amazing 👏🏿.

When I was a kid, I really wanted to be a meteorologist... just to think, instead of playing around with PCs in the 90s, I'd have been running on one of these beauties. Your collection is a thing of beauty... those high end CPUs look like a mixture of UFO technology, jewels and magic.

you can build perhaps one day you own computer based on this exotic computer components

And now all top500 computers are off the shelf parts (ok, not including interconnect, which is special), not some crazy special architectures. Boooooring.

@bitrage.

Жыл бұрын

Yea, but on the other hand it's soo much more attainable, it's cool being able to get same hardware that pro industry uses with having millions of dollers.... there are pros and cons...

@CPUGalaxy

Жыл бұрын

you need to see this in a historical matter. Back in 2003 it was a special architecture. And you are here on a retro computer tech channel 😉

@pete3897

Жыл бұрын

​@@CPUGalaxy I think he meant the current top500 are boring, in contrast to this beast :)

@MrMackievelli

Жыл бұрын

I'm pretty sure Fujitsu, Sunway and IBM all use in house processors. I'm sure their are others too.

@blacklion79

Жыл бұрын

@@MrMackievelli Fujitsu uses ARM architecture. IBM uses Z in mainframes, yes, very last very custom architecture. Sunway is mostly MIPS, with some changes, but anyway nothing very special or crazy, and their chips are very conventional ones. There are some interesting architectures on the market, like Tilera64, yes, but nothing so special as Cray X1, designed in house from top to bottom with innovative cooling system or hierarchical memory with custom address translation. IBM z/System is the last non-conventional system on the market.

Seeing how companies was making MCM CPUs way back in the day you have to wonder why it wasn't picked up sooner for the consumer market, AMD was the first real push for MCM CPUs into the consumer market with the Ryzen CPUs, now others are taking that same approach in consumer CPUs being that AMD was highly successful with it (and now GPUs are starting to go MCM). MCM is better in many aspects (especially in terms of yelds and cost) than a large monolithic dies.

@supabass4003

Жыл бұрын

Probably because most consumer software was single threaded, and people in the early 2000s were caught up in the Pentium 4 hype, which was a whole lotta marketing. People really believed in Rambus and 10ghz P4s were right around the corner.

While i love your awesome collection, i was kinda hoping to see you run some of these MCMs

FYI: Cray Inc. that produced the Cray X1 is not the original Cray Research. Cray Research was acquired by Silicon Graphics in 1996. Cray Inc. was formed when Tera Computer Company purchased the Cray Research Inc. business from SGI in 2000.

You should do more videos explaining these strange processors on your table.

Hello back T-800. We know you are collecting all these CPUs so you can build Cyberdyne.

i can only imagine what the modern equivalent would be maybe if i'm patient and wait 20 more years i will

"I will go in for a closer look. Ahhhhhh! The goggles do nothing!!!"

Nice one :) i always admired Cray for the sake of art :) - glad that in 2000s it doesnt containt GaAs :) and that you dont need reballing anymore. BTW do you know that the heart cooling substance used in one of the crays was only used for promotional matters? They could easily use some cheaper oil but decided to use the medical one :)

That thing ran RAMBUS? Wow, there’s a blast from the past.

Küss die Hand, was ein Teil!

the cooling is amazing that can handle 500+ Watt TDP of energy!

We miss you! Come back!

Wie du immer zu solchen Raritäten kommst :D GLG (ein ehem. DrauEletronik Kunde) ^^

@CPUGalaxy

Жыл бұрын

Maaa das freut mich nette Leute aus meiner Vergangenheit hier zu sehen. 😍

@BruceCarbonLakeriver

Жыл бұрын

@@CPUGalaxy :))) Ich war oft mit meinem Bruder dort. Wie haben ja auch gelötet wie die Wahnsinnigen. Ist schon ewig her - freut mich, dass du auch nen Channel hast. Hab den erst gestern entdeckt. Weiter so! Finde deine Präsentation super und deine Thumbnails sind wahrlich Gold :) Viel Erfolg weiterhin. Soweit ich weiß bist du ja "bei der einen großen Firma in der Stadt" o/

This looks quite similar to the MCMs found in IBM's zSeries mainframes. I wonder if it is designed by IBM as well, but I couldn't find any supporting information on the net.

@CPUGalaxy

Жыл бұрын

the MCM was manufactured by IBM.

@blacklion79

Жыл бұрын

Three-part video, linked in description, says that it is manufactured by IBM.

@ByWire-yk8eh

Жыл бұрын

IBM had 100/118 chip MCM's in the 308X (S/390) series circa 1980. The first cooling attempt was liquid fluorocarbon swirling around the chips, but this rotted the chips. They finally decided on little aluminum pistons touching the back of the chips and used helium to better conduct the heat.

In desktop 8-core CPU revealed only 20 years later... XCan You imagine what is in modern research labs now?

Watch out, he's packing big iorn.

😂😂😂Just when we think we've seen it all, an American nerd always shows up showing something different. Jokes aside, congratulations on the excellent video. These processors seem to have come out of science fiction movies (Star Trek). Thanks for showing.

i recently got ahold of an intel 8052 microcontroller, do you happen to have one in your collection?

Herzlichen Dank!

Yo that system is cray cray.

fascinante!!!!!

It's like fine jewelry

Gold plated Silicon chips, yummy😋

interesting indeed

Ah shit yeah, another CPU Galaxy upload.

That's a gangster ass collection.

"Let's remove the cpu carefully" *KZread sharp intake of breath*

Wow where do you get that stuff from?

Was it watercooled? I could imagine water flowing directly on the chip with that assembly. Scary.

1:19 So these are Alpha with custom vector extensions?

It seems that ceramic slabs are hell expensive today as none of vendors produces such CPUs for mass market.

Lol. I bid on that on eBay about 2 weeks ago. I’m glad that I lost so we could get this video.

@CPUGalaxy

Жыл бұрын

🥹

That one is really neat. How the heck do you find this stuff? Is it really all "luck of the draw" or do you have some sort of secret connections you ain't tellin' us about? Because I've looked for mainframe stuff on eBay in the past and I swear, either my "Google foo" is just not up to snuff (i.e. I'm not using the "correct" search terms somehow) or I live in the wrong geographical part of the world or the universe is somehow against me having any of that. The closest to a proper mainframe processor I've gotten up to now is a POWER7 SC-TCM which I bought from a computer parts reseller in Manassas, VA. I believe you have one of those as well as I've seen yours in your display, proudly labeled "POWER7". I don't get how you have so much better luck than I do. What's your secret, dude? By the way, about that 500 watt TDP. Chips today are getting there. In fact, GPUs are already getting close to that now and CPUs are not far behind. And MCM is the norm now, with AMD's Ryzen Threadripper and Epyc processors and Intel's Sapphire Rapids Xeons all using it. I've seen articles from Serve the Home (look 'em up, they're here on KZread) talking about liquid cooling now becoming a requirement for modern servers because of the huge amount of heat they're starting to generate. Conventional air-cooled systems are quickly becoming a thing of the past as TDPs rise to a kilowatt and more. Glad to see you back in action after such a long hiatus.