Path: utzoo!mnetor!uunet!lll-winken!lll-tis!mordor!sri-spam!sri-unix!garth!walter
From: walter@garth.UUCP (Walter Bays)
Newsgroups: comp.arch
Subject: Re: Motorola 88000 and others
Message-ID: <590@garth.UUCP>
Date: 4 Apr 88 17:21:22 GMT
References: <1168@csun.UUCP>
Reply-To: walter@garth.UUCP (Walter Bays)
Organization: INTERGRAPH (APD) -- Palo Alto, CA
Lines: 33

In article <1168@csun.UUCP> sef@csun.UUCP (Sean Fagan) writes:
>I was reading in some trade rag (sorry, forget which) about the MC88000,
>which uses a 'scoreboard' to have up to 3 instructions executing
>simultaneously (plus whatever pipelining the thing has).  [...]
>The thing I find funny is that these people seem to think that these things
>are wonderful new ideas, yet I routinely work on a CDC 170 type machine,
>[They are old ideas.]
>Now, after the comment, a question:  does anybody know what non-mainframes
>and non-supers have parallel functional units (preferably pipelined)?
>How about how popular these machines are, what their speeds are, etc?

The Intergraph Clipper has parallel integer and (on-chip) floating
point units, with pipelining.  The integer unit is multi-stage and the
pipeline is controlled by a scoreboard.  It has separate instruction
and data busses through two 4KB integrated cache/MMU chips to interface
with slow DRAM's.  The C100 was introduced in 1985 and runs at 33 MHz.
The C300 will be introduced this year, runs at 50 MHz, and has an
improved pipeline.  Not surprisingly, the original design team came to
(then Fairchild) from Cray.

In college I worked on a CDC 6600 (Seymour's machine) which had
multiple functional units, pipelining, scoreboarding, and I/O
co-processors.  Those who had to use assembly language cursed its
load/store architecture and limited addressing modes.  The rest of us
were just glad it was so fast.  The 6600 was a significant improvement
over most of its successors.
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