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why did 70/80/90 only have 1 cpu if cpus where so slow?

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mendip_discovery:
They existed, mostly on servers. I remember Apple had them on the G4 machines in the early 2000s and it's how they were able to outperform the windoes PCs for graphics for a while. It wasn't cheap. The cpu was always one of the more expensive parts and I remember having a 200mhz Citrix and a few years later the processor speeds had jumped so we were often quite happy with the speed as things moved quite quickly. We also had software and a OS that was rather efficient, not like all the bloat we have now.

BillyO:
In the 70's Ohio Scientific had the C3.  It had 3 processors.  I'm sure there were others.

In the 80's DEC had many systems with multiple processors (VAX clusters) and even had a PC, the DEC Rainbow 100 that had 2 processors.

By the 90's there were multi-processor systems all over the place and they were quite common.  In 1998 I had a Dell machine under my desk that had two Pentium II processors in it.

alm:
As a research project, the massively parallel (designed for 256 CPUs, but built with 64 CPUs) ILLiAC IV was already conceived in the fifties, designed in the sixties and delivered in the seventies. although not a successful project on its own, this certainly inspired other development of large multi-processor systems.

xrunner:

--- Quote from: aqarwaen on March 25, 2023, 09:47:35 pm ---so my question is why did 70/80/90 only have 1 cpu if cpus where so slow?if i understand most computer only had 1 single main cpu.
for example why it was possible use for example multiple Intel 4004
instead single main cpu to make faster computers.
if money was not issue,what would prevent 4 same cpus running in single system?

--- End quote ---

I was told by my friends back in the day I was crazy for buying a 20 MHz clocked 386 PC. Why would I need such a powerful CPU?  ::)

tooki:

--- Quote from: mendip_discovery on March 26, 2023, 04:00:24 pm ---They existed, mostly on servers. I remember Apple had them on the G4 machines in the early 2000s and it's how they were able to outperform the windoes PCs for graphics for a while.

--- End quote ---
And that was far from the first. The first dual-processor Mac from Apple* was the Power Mac 9500/180MP from August 1996.

And of course there’s the philosophical question of whether the 1980s-90s Macs with PC daughtercards — a full PC motherboard shrunk down into an expansion card plugged into a host Mac — count as multiprocessor, since they contained a separate Intel CPU just for DOS/Windows to run on. Third parties sold such cards, but Apple also sold “PC Compatible” versions of some Mac models, with such a thing factory installed.

*”From Apple” because the very first dual- and quad-processor Macs were actually licensed Mac clones by DayStar. It worked so well that DayStar actually made the dual-processor CPU daughtercard in the 9500/180MP, and it was DayStar’s multiprocessing API that became the classic Mac OS multiprocessing API.

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