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DEC's StrongARM processor was almost this: > According to Allen Baum, the StrongARM traces its history to attempts to make a low-power version of the DEC Alpha
by laurencerowe 5y ago
DEC's StrongARM processor was almost this:
> According to Allen Baum, the StrongARM traces its history to attempts to make a low-power version of the DEC Alpha, which DEC's engineers quickly concluded was not possible. They then became interested in designs dedicated to low-power applications which led them to the ARM family. One of the only major users of the ARM for performance-related products at that time was Apple, whose Newton device was based on the ARM platform. DEC approached Apple wondering if they might be interested in a high-performance ARM, to which the Apple engineers replied "Phhht, yeah. You can't do it, but, yeah, if you could we'd use it." -https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/StrongARM https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/StrongARM
And while the IP didn't directly influence Apple Silicon, the experience did:
> P. A. Semi (originally Palo Alto Semiconductor[1]) was an American fabless semiconductor company founded in Santa Clara, California in 2003 by Daniel W. Dobberpuhl,[2][3] who was previously the lead designer for the DEC Alpha 21064 and StrongARM processors. The company employed a 150-person engineering team which included people who had previously worked on processors like Itanium, Opteron and UltraSPARC. Apple Inc acquired P.A. Semi for $278 million in April 2008. - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/P.A._Semi https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/P.A._Semi
- dm319 5y agoOh interesting. Think that's what was running on my Psion 5mx. GP needs a Psion 7 then.
- qbasic_forever 5y agoHah wow, that is too cool to see it all come back around with ARM. Imagine if they kept refining the Newton instead of shelving it until the iPad was really possible.
- Joeri 5y agoThat’s fascinating and dovetails well with Windows NT’s origin story, where internal OS research at DEC that got canceled (the MICA project) ended up with its lead architect Dave Cutler and his team walking out and moving to Microsoft, where they used the knowledge they had learned building MICA to build Windows NT. And then there is the DEC PDP, which enabled some of the former Multics developers (Ken Thompson & co) to take what they had learned building Multics and apply it to the affordable PDP hardware to build Unix, which then inspired Linux. DEC may no longer exist, but their shadow reaches a long way into the future.
- panick21_ 5y agoThis Twitter-Space recording about NT development is quite fun: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hlQuF75L4TE&t=5s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hlQuF75L4TE&t=5s
- fulafel 5y agoAlso PA Semi's PowerPC chip[1]. Apple passed on doing the "in house CPU" with ingredients in hand, and instead took the painful ppc -> x86 transition.. which was possibly fortunate as the mobile product side was a better place to start growing their own silicon products. [1] https://arstechnica.com/uncategorized/2005/10/5486-2/ https://arstechnica.com/uncategorized/2005/10/5486-2/ (product annoncement before getting Apple-acquired)