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From: hansen@mips.UUCP (Craig Hansen)
Newsgroups: net.arch
Subject: Re: HP RISC comments
Message-ID: <410@mips.UUCP>
Date: Thu, 20-Mar-86 23:32:51 EST
Article-I.D.: mips.410
Posted: Thu Mar 20 23:32:51 1986
Date-Received: Sat, 22-Mar-86 23:40:18 EST
References: <6504@utzoo.UUCP> <15000001@hpcvrd.UUCP>
Organization: MIPS Computer Systems, Sunnyvale, CA
Lines: 24

> >   If anyone out there has seen the HP spectrum and looked carefully at
> >it, I'd like to hear your comments.  From a cursory inspection it looks
> >like an HP3000 (which has an interesting, albeit slow, stack architecture),
> 
> Dave Patterson, of Berkeley, wrote the first paper proposing a RISC
> architecture after spending some time working at HP, and, except for the
> register windows, which resemble a feature of the TI 9900 processor, his
> proposed machine closely resembled the micro-machine in the old HP3000s, even
> to the names of the fields in an instruction.  In effect, his RISC machine
> had user programs written in microcode.  It shouldn't be surprising if a RISC 
> machine resembles the HP3000.
> 
> Dave Rabinowitz
> hplabs!ho-pcd!daver

Spectrum (ahem, "Precision") isn't a stack architecture, and doesn't
have an instruction set that resembles the HP3000.
I won't comment on how Spectrum executes HP3000 code except to say
that Spectrum doesn't have a mode bit (In "Soul of a New Machine"
parlance, a bag on the side of the machine).

Craig Hansen			| "Evahthun' tastes
MIPS Computer Systems		| bettah when it
...decwrl!glacier!mips!hansen	| sits on a RISC"