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AppleCrate II: Apple II-Based Parallel Computer
sproketboy noted that many years ago
Michael J. Mahon built the AppleCrate — a parallel stack of Apple IIs — for no good reason. Recently he came back with the AppleCrate II, which more than doubles the number of motherboards, and at least triples the awesomeness.
Apple II == 6502 CPU from Commodore Semiconductor
I'd sooner have an Apple IIgs stack however (with its 16 bit 65000). Same ease-of-use as the original 8 bit computer, but operates about six times faster, and has a Mac-style OS.
My AC stalker: " I personally agree with your posts most of the time, but that won't keep me from modding you troll"
I'm even wondering if this thing runs faster than my cellphone...
If Pandora's box is destined to be opened, *I* want to be the one to open it.
Of course, nowadays the generic PC is a cluster computer. How many single-core machines do you see these days? Factor in the GPU, and you pretty much are hacking on a mid-80s vector computer.
-twb
Would it even be possible to make a stack with Commodore 64's?
The 6800 came from Motorola. The 6502 was the successor the the 6501, both of which came from MOSTEK. Commodore may have had cpus contracted out, but the 6500 came nearly a decade before commodore hit the bigtime. MOSTEK was one of the leaders at the time because they offered experimenters a $20 "kit" that included a manual AND a 6501 CPU chip. This price was phenomenal at the time. The 6502 was the cpu that powered the KIM and SYM microcomputer kits, which were also very capable and very affordable - at $250 they were a fraction the price of the 8080 and z80 based machines of the time, and were equally capable (in fact, in many cases, much faster).
NOT a 65000, NOT a 68000, not a 6800, and so on. The 6800 was a slightly different beast, pushed by Motorola because they thought they had the power to overcome mostek's intertia because they're freaking motorola. But the 6800 was inferior in many ways, and it didn't happen until the 65xx line was long sold and dying.
If you look at this actual website, it becomes more obvious WHY he's using Apple II boards.
#1) He's using discrete components and actual wire and solder to cobble the boards into a single computer. He uses perf-board and socketed chips to build his extra peripherals. YOU CANNOT DO THAT with modern Intel-based mobos. They are all surface mount and pretty much unhackable unless you've got some elYte equipment.
#2) The Apple II board was built by a hacker, for hackers. That makes it the obvious choice in a nutshell. This is exactly the kind of stuff Woz wanted people to do with his creation.
#3) There's no challenge to doing parallel computing with an intel mobo -- they are already coming off the shelf with 8 cores. What's the fun in that?
If telephones are outlawed, then only outlaws will have telephones.
#2) The Apple II board was built by a hacker, for hackers. That makes it the obvious choice in a nutshell. This is exactly the kind of stuff Woz wanted people to do with his creation.
Wow, kind of a reminder of how much they've changed. These days it's, "You need an Apple technician to replace the battery / hard drive / casing / logo..."
Information theory is life. The rest is just the KL divergence.