PEPE was designed to be a much larger machine with up to 288 processors, allowing it to track every visible nuclear warhead launched from the Soviet Union in an all-out ICBM attack.
When it was announced, the 50 MFLOPS speed of the BSP would make it among the fastest machines in the world, but it was simpler than the other high-end designs.
[2] In modern terminology, the BSP is a SIMD machine, as it has a single instruction running on multiple data.
[4] This contrasts with most high-performance designs of the era (and today), which rely heavily on processor registers to avoid having to deal with main memory whenever possible.
In contrast, BSP loaded the setup into the crossbar and ran, part of a short five-stage pipeline.
The designers believed that the slower speed would be made up by the parallel processing and the lack of waiting for memory.
Austin noted "Simply put, the clock frequency does not indicate how fast a machine runs, just how often it stops!
It was based on early semiconductor-based random access memory (RAM) with a 12.5 MW transfer speed.
The global memory pool was a novel feature and led to significant market interest, but the cost of implementing the switching system was so high that later machines did not use this architecture.