The Impact of Future Developments in Computer Technology.

William R. Graham

Expert InsightsPublished 1970

Compares the relative advantages of two new computers, the University of Illinois' parallel-organized ILLIAC IV and the Control Data Corporation's pipeline-organized STAR. Both increase computing speed by their overall organization. The parallel design drives many identical copies of the conventional computer's arithmetic unit with only one control unit, which obtains, decodes, and issues instructions. The pipeline processor starts retrieving a second set of operands, located in memory adjacent to the first, before the first result has been returned to the memory. The STAR and an ILLIAC IV quadrant have comparable speeds for adding, though the ILLIAC forms a few sums more quickly. In multiplication, the ILLIAC is always faster. In division, the STAR is about twice as fast as the ILLIAC in finding a single quotient, but the ILLIAC is about 1.4 times faster in calculating a long sequence of quotients. 15 pp.

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Graham, William R., The Impact of Future Developments in Computer Technology. Santa Monica, CA: RAND Corporation, 1970. https://www.rand.org/pubs/papers/P4401.html.
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