> That would be interesting - looking forward to comments from
> Antonio and others about whether this is really possible...
I *think* that, although only the 3520 and 3540 made it out
as officially available systems, that you could in fact
build up at least a 3560 and 3580 (i.e. up to four CPU
boards yielding a total of 8 CPUs). That's just based on
having seen something in the VMS Listings a long time
ago.
There was also a speed bump considered, and possibly
built, which got as far as being allocated a system number,
possibly along the lines of 38x0 (i.e. 3820, 3840 etc.) and
that one had a tantalising 38A0 as a possible name IIRC.
This speedup for the Firefox (codenamed Fastfox) never
made it out of the door. I expect that multicpu workstations
were just not in vogue at the time.
I presume that the reason that the 3560 and 3580 were never
marketted was down to performance scaling badly with
inceasing number of cpus, or possibly there may have
been a fatal problem (like the 3-CPU VAX 8300 variants
occasionally locking up and the 4-CPU variant being
pretty much guaranteed to lock during boot).
Antonio
--
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Antonio Carlini arcarlini_at_iee.org
Received on Sun Oct 12 2003 - 16:44:10 BST