Vector Processor
Hard Drive Recovery - Vector Processor
A vector processor, also known as array processor, is a CPU design that consists of an instruction set containing operations that can perform mathematical operations on multiple data elements simultaneously. Vector processors were popular in scientific computing era, and they formed the basis of supercomputers through the 1980s and into the 1990s.
The first known successful implementation of vector processing is the CDC STAR-100 and the Texas Instruments Advanced Scientific Computer (ASC). The basic ASC ALU used a pipeline architecture which supported both scalar and vector computations, with peak performance reaching approximately 20 MFLOPS, readily achieved when processing long vectors. Expanded configurations supported “two pipes” or “four pipes” with a corresponding 2X or 4X performance gain.
Vector processor is in contrast to a scalar processor, which handles one element at a time using multiple instructions. Majority of commodity CPU designs include single instructions for some vector processing on multiple data sets, typically known as Single Instruction, Multiple Data (SIMD). Examples are SSE and AltiVec.
However, modern video game consoles and consumer computer-graphics hardware depends on vector processing. An example of such an architectural design is the Cell processor designed by the collaboration of IBM, Toshiba and Sony in 2000. This design has one scalar processor and eight vector processors and is used in Sony PlayStation 3 among other applications. In these implementations the vector processor runs beside the main scalar CPU, and is fed data from programs that know it is there.
