[rescue] IBM on ebay

[James Lockwood]

On Tue, 14 May 2002, Francisco Javier Mesa-Martinez wrote:

> On Tue, 14 May 2002 dave at cca.org wrote:
>
> > vance at ikickass.org writes:
> >
> > >On Tue, 14 May 2002 dave at cca.org wrote:
> >
> > >> (I just like the historic irony of POWER returning to its IO
> > >> processor ancestry.)
> >
> > >Actually POWER evolved from the chip that was used in the DisplayWriter.
> >
> > What about the 801?
>
> Since when did POWER evolve from the 8086?

The 801 does not owe extensive heritage to the 8086 (it was an
experimental ECL minicomputer architecture).  It draws more extensively on
the 709 and, in spirit, the CDC 6600 (then again, so does everything
RISC).

Saying that POWER evolved from the 801 (via ROMP 032) is a bit of a
stretch.  Some things were certainly carried over (MMU) but much of the
design was original.  RIOS (the first 6 chip POWER implementation) had 184
instructions, hardly "RISC" by many standards.  Much of this was slimmed
down for PowerPC and some of the more complex string operations were
emulated.

Other interesting architectures that were inspired by the 801 included
Stanford MIPS (which begat the _mips_ computer company) and David
Patterson's RISC-I, which begat RISC-II, which begat the original SPARC.

-James