How a maverick genius at IBM helped to change the course of computing forever. The RISC idea has now been around for around fifty years and it’s been the subject of debate and a degree of controversy for much of that period. By Babbage.
But some of IBM’s engineers were convinced of the benefits of a simple yet powerful computer. So members of the project returned to IBM Research and started work to turn the ideas into a general-purpose computer.
The main sections in the article:
- Origins
- Enter Ericsson
- Work starts on the 801
- Instruction traces
- Building the RISC philosophy
- The 801 architecture
- The revised 801
- The 801 delivers
The term RISC came to be used first in the RISC-1 project led by David Patterson at U.C. Berkeley. Along with John Hennessy at Stanford University, Patterson and his students would pick up the RISC concept and build the first microprocessors using RISC principles. And that’s where our series goes next. Nice one!
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