Path: utzoo!mnetor!uunet!husc6!purdue!decwrl!granite!paulr
From: paulr@granite.dec.com (Paul Richardson)
Newsgroups: comp.arch
Subject: Re: Proposed architecture characterization survey form
Message-ID: <222@granite.dec.com>
Date: 21 Apr 88 14:43:36 GMT
References: <2048@gumby.mips.COM> <49983@sun.uucp> <20123@pyramid.pyramid.com> <221@granite.dec.com>
Reply-To: paulr@granite.UUCP (Paul Richardson)
Organization: DEC Workstation Systems Engineering
Lines: 62

In article <221@granite.dec.com> allen@decwrl.dec.com (Allen Akin) writes:
>In article <20123@pyramid.pyramid.com> csg@pyramid.pyramid.com (Carl S. Gutekunst) writes:
>>
>>DEC's big RISC engine goes by the code name "Titan." It is something around 10
>>MIPS, up to 10 tightly-coupled CPUs. It's supposed to be a big secret, so don't
>>spead this around. :-)
>>
>><csg>
>
>Just to clarify things for the masses:
>
>Titan is a research RISC machine designed and implemented several years
>ago by DEC's Western Research Lab in Palo Alto.  It's been mentioned in
>a number of papers published by WRL (see Wall and Powell's paper in
>ASPLOS II, for example) so feel free to spread it around. :-)
>
>Allen


More Titan History:

	I was on a team of engineers trying to turn the research Titan
into Titan the product.Obviously we never succeeded mostly because of
political reasons,some valid,some not valid:


Titan:
	'Risc' Machine designed to run at 40 ns,I believe they are running
	 at 42.

	Scalar processor consisted of datapath,and 64kb i and d caches (split)
	line size was 4 longwords

	Seperate Coprocessor
	
	4 banks of 64 32 general purpose registers bit registers.

	128 Mbytes of main store

 	Entire processor (icache,dcache,datapath and floating point 
			  coprocessor) were contructed from 24 pin
	       dip components (100K ecl).

	Processor boards were approx 20" x 28",something like that

	7 slot I/O bay supported disks(currentl RA81s),enet,serial lines, and
	fiber optic link.

	Machine was designed as single user workstation for members of WRL.

	Languages at the time included modulea-2,C,and Fortran (I think 
	they have lisp up now too)

	A system (above hardware running 4.3 BSD) performed on an 
	aggregate basis,of 10 times a 780.

	Fully funtional protos were completed 2 years ago.

	I think it is still the fastest running uniprocessor in DEC

	Aprroximately same compiler technology as Mips.The papers
	mentioned by Allen should clue you in.