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From: "Brian R. Hanson" <brh@cray.com>
Subject: Re: The disturbing myth of Eiffel portability
Date: 1996/12/02
Message-ID: <32A2F7B4.41C6@cray.com>#1/1
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references: <3294e64b.74799475@news2.ibm.net> <56t1m4$nis@bcrkh13.bnr.ca>
 <dewar.848444338@merv> <1996Nov20.065345.1@eisner> <dewar.848592914@merv>
 <1996Nov22.074528.1@eisner> <dewar.848713436@merv>
 <57rgc3$rnh@booboo.cs.ucsb.edu> <dewar.849443758@merv>
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organization: Cray Research a division of Silicon Graphics, Inc.
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Date: 1996-12-02T00:00:00+00:00
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Robert Dewar wrote:

> The old style vector machine Crays (to which P&H refers) definitely are
> NOT IEEE, or even close, and as per my previous message use reciprocal
> hardware for division, meaning that division results can be off by one bit.
> Implementing Java efficiently on those machines, which are now largely
> obsolete, is out of the question.
> 
> Newer Crays are multiprocessors using at the moment Alpha's, although
> considering the ownership, one might expect them to shift to MIPS chips
> in the future. But in either case, we are talking about chips that are
> subtly IEEE incompatible, as per my previous message.

The machines refered to in the previous paragraph are the Massively
Parallel
machines but it is also true that the latest top of the line cray vector 
machines now do IEEE floating point.

-- Brian Hanson
-- brh@cray.com