《01.PowerPC.History》.pdf

A Brief Introduction of The A Brief Introduction of The History of PowerPC History of PowerPC © Copyright IBM Corporation 2009 IBM 801 - The Very Beginning of PowerPC IBM 801 - The Very Beginning of PowerPC In 1970s, John Cocke at IBM Watson Research Lab started a research project on improving computer architecture design in a manner now collectively known as “RISC” In 1977, the resulting CPU, IBM 801, is produced All instructions complete in one clock cycle 15MIPS, No FPU Was one of the first RISC CPU chip 801 was named after the building where the project was done IBM 801 was used in many IBM products, including 370 main frames in early 1980s John Cocke later won both the Turing award and the Presidential Medal of Science for his work on the 801. Page 2 © Copyright IBM Corporation 2009 POWER – The Parent of PowerPC POWER – The Parent of PowerPC 1985, IBM Watson Research Lab started the research project on the second-generation RISC architecture based on the lessons learned from IBM 801 The main research points include Superscaler Add of FPU The effort resulted in the POWER architecture Stands for Power Optimization With Enhanced RISC The first implementation of POWER architecture was released on 1990 – the POWER1 POWER1 were used in RS/6000 in early 1990s Central Processor for Mars Pathfinder mission POWER1 is the chip where PowerPC is descended Page 3 © Copyright IBM Corporation 2009 The Birth of PowerPC The Birth of PowerPC Around 1991, IBM approached Apple with the goal to develop microprocessors for large volume market based on POWER Apple, then the largest customers of Motorola’s desktop-class microprocessor, asked