Well, I didn't know much about Atlas until now, so I had to do some
research;
very impressive, indeed. Atlas is about 3 to 5 times faster than the TR 4.
But in contrast to Atlas, the TR 4 was produced in a sort of small
industrial series (35 machines);
Atlas seems to be a super computer with very few installations.
What strikes me most are the similarities:
- 48 bit words
- two 24 bit signed integers or six 8 bit-bytes or one 48 bit integer or
floating point
- or one instruction (two on TR 4 / TR 440)
- 24 bit address space (only 16 on the TR 4, later 22 on the TR 440)
- 16 k words of core store (32 k max on TR 4, 192 k words on the TR 440,
maybe more)
- 8 k words of read only memory for supervisor etc. (4 k on TR 4,
nothing on TR 440,
was loaded at startup time)
Atlas was the first implementation of virtual memory,
but the first paper on virtual memory is from Fritz-Rudolf Güntsch from
1957
https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fritz-Rudolf_G%C3%BCntsch -
German wikipedia says: Güntsch is the inventor of virtual memory
(German title: F.-R. Güntsch: /Logischer Entwurf eines digitalen
Rechengeräts
mit mehreren asynchron laufenden Trommeln und automatischem
Schnellspeicherbetrieb./
TU Berlin, 1957 (Dissertation)) - and: Fritz-Rudolf Güntsch later (in
the 1960s)
worked for Telefunken and was the designer of the TR 4 and the TR 440 :-)
Kind regards
Bernd
Am 16.11.2020 um 20:46 schrieb Seymour J Metz:
Faster than Atlas?
--
Shmuel (Seymour J.) Metz
http://mason.gmu.edu/~smetz3
________________________________________
From: IBM Mainframe Discussion List <[email protected]> on behalf of Bernd
Oppolzer <[email protected]>
Sent: Sunday, November 15, 2020 5:43 PM
To: [email protected]
Subject: Re: Improve OMVS cp performance?
Telefunken TR 4, designed 1958, first delivered in 1962. This predates
IBM/360
by at least 4 years. The fastest mainframe built in Europe at that time.
The internal code ("Zentralcode") was an 8-bit code using 256 characters.
Word structure, a word had 48 bits plus 2 tag bits (tagged architecture)
plus some parity bits, not seen by the programmer.
Mostly used with ALGOL; the TR 4 was "a Hardware implementation of ALGOL"
(quote from E.J. Dijkstra).
A word could hold up to six characters, but some later languages
(like Fortran) decided to store only 4 characters in one word,
to be more compatible with IBM Fortran.
Kind regards
Bernd
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