8 ms·

When I worked at IBM in the early 2000's I occasionally remember hearing people say "IBM invented RISC!". As a young pup I knew to keep my mouth shut, but in my

When I worked at IBM in the early 2000's I occasionally remember hearing people say "IBM invented RISC!". As a young pup I knew to keep my mouth shut, but in my head I was like "best keep that news to yourself pop, the rest of the world only knows about the history of RISC-V" which is the only RISC we learned about in technical school in the late 90's. I didn't doubt IBM did something similar early on though, but it just came across to me as another funny IBM community knowledge thing that was a little off-base which wasn't too uncommon anyway. Obviously the IBM old timers were not off-base though. But it is nice to see history recognizing earlier pioneers in the field like John Cocke. And this article also demonstrates something I found perplexing as a young pup: IBM's marketing department dictated what engineering did. Obviously the point of the company is to make solutions that customers want to pay money for. Just because engineering has a better solution doesn't mean it's the best fit for customers (or the most profitable solution to the problem). But with my head stuck in FOSS philosophy of the day it was a good education in real life.

kragen 4y ago
It's surprising that you learned about RISC-V in technical school in the late 90s, since the RISC-V project began in 02010 at Berkeley. You should see if you can get in touch with your instructor and help him fix his time machine.
- dboreham 4y ago
  Perhaps parent meant MIPS.
  - kragen 4y ago
    Perhaps, but it would be a lot more interesting if it turned out his instructor did know about RISC-V in the 90s!
klelatti 4y ago
Funnily enough, I worked for IBM marketing (my first job, for a short while) in 1984. One of our jobs was to demo System/36 - one of IBM's minis - which might have been replaced by an 801 system had they taken it up. One of my colleagues went through the demo with a room of customers. At the end he asked for questions. Straight away a hand went up. "If it's this slow with one user, how slow is it with five?" Sometimes engineering does know best!
rjsw 4y ago
The RISC-II thesis from 1983 references the 801, but it looks like IBM only started talking about it at around this time. The RISC-V project didn't start until 2010.
- klelatti 4y ago
  There is a funny quote from David Patterson in his Oral History > There was the 801 project was secretive. There is something called the 801, “What is it?” It was very hard to know even what they were doing. It was supposed to be very exciting, very breakthrough, but unless John Cocke came and told you what they were doing, you couldn't figure out anything about it. So, there was that kind of the mystery of the 801. I think word did get out in the late 1970s but not officially!
  - rjsw 4y ago
    One of the references in the Katevenis thesis is "J. Cocke: Informal discussion on the IBM 801 mini-computer, U.C.Berkeley Campus, June 1983".
    - klelatti 4y ago
      From memory I think Cocke lectured at Berkeley (and maybe at Stanford too?)
- abudabi123 4y ago
  SC stood for Seymour Cray in RISC went one joke in his memory you can find on YT. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seymour_Cray https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seymour_Cray
classichasclass 4y ago
> the rest of the world only knows about the history of RISC-V" which is the only RISC we learned about in technical school in the late 90's. This surprises me, especially since RISC-V wasn't really a thing until around 2010. Not MIPS, SPARC, PowerPC, PA-RISC, ARM, all extant by this period and having a longer history, but RISC-V? What school was this?
- cmrdporcupine 4y ago
  I suspect the comment author typo'd and meant to write either MIPS or (more likely) Berkeley RISC.
- p_l 4y ago
  It's technically correct, because the "V" in RISC-V refers to it being the 5th project from UC Berkeley (after RISC-I, RISC-II, and tenuously naming SOAR as RISC-III, and either SPUR or VLSI-BAM as RISC-IV).
adrian_b 4y ago
Actually in this case IBM really has the right to brag about it, because there is no doubt that IBM 801 included the first RISC CPU, even if the name RISC was invented only several years later. Before IBM 801, there have been many simple CPUs, which, if they would be launched today, they would be called RISC CPUs, due to their simplicity. However for those old CPUs the simplicity was not intentional, but it was determined by the limitations of their manufacturing technology. On the other hand, the IBM 801 project, which has started in 1975, significant documentation about its principles of operation has been published during 1976 and a working prototype existed in 1978, was a project whose target was to intentionally reverse the trend towards more and more complex CPUs and investigate the ways by which greater simplicity may be in fact a method for reaching a higher performance. All the principles for obtaining high performance with a simpler CPU were discussed in the IBM 801 documentation 4 to 5 years before the RISC project at Berkeley (1980 to 1984) and the MIPS project at Stanford (1981 to 1984). Moreover, in March 1982 there has been a very important symposium where all the teams working at that time on RISC CPUs have presented their work, including the Berkeley RISC, Stanford MIPS and IBM 801 projects. The presentations from that symposium have determined the designers of the future ARM CPU to change their architecture from some kind of 6502 extension to a RISC architecture. They have been particularly impressed by the IBM 801 presentation, so instead of using weak addressing modes, like in the RISC and MIPS projects, they have included in ARM the much more powerful IBM 801 addressing modes (i.e. including modes with base register auto update). While John Cocke has not invented the word RISC when designing IBM 801, either he or another member of his team (which worked at the project that eventually became IBM POWER) has invented the word "superscalar", a few years later, in 1987, when the design target for CPUs had moved from being able to execute one instruction in a single clock cycle, like in the early RISC CPUs, to being able to execute multiple instructions per clock cycle.
- cachvico 4y ago
  > Moreover, in March 1982 there has been a very important symposium where all the teams working at that time on RISC CPUs have presented their work, including the Berkeley RISC, Stanford MIPS and IBM 801 projects. > The presentations from that symposium have determined the designers of the future ARM CPU to change their architecture from some kind of 6502 extension to a RISC architecture. That is absolutely fascinating. Are the papers from that conference available online?
panick21_ 4y ago
The early risk people gave a lot of credit to Crey.
brucehoult 4y ago
>in my head I was like "best keep that news to yourself pop, the rest of the world only knows about the history of RISC-V" which is the only RISC we learned about in technical school in the late 90's That must have been quite some trick, since RISC-V was created only in the 2010s!

kragen 4y ago

It's surprising that you learned about RISC-V in technical school in the late 90s, since the RISC-V project began in 02010 at Berkeley. You should see if you can get in touch with your instructor and help him fix his time machine.

dboreham 4y ago
Perhaps parent meant MIPS.
- kragen 4y ago
  Perhaps, but it would be a lot more interesting if it turned out his instructor did know about RISC-V in the 90s!

klelatti 4y ago

Funnily enough, I worked for IBM marketing (my first job, for a short while) in 1984. One of our jobs was to demo System/36 - one of IBM's minis - which might have been replaced by an 801 system had they taken it up. One of my colleagues went through the demo with a room of customers. At the end he asked for questions. Straight away a hand went up. "If it's this slow with one user, how slow is it with five?" Sometimes engineering does know best!

rjsw 4y ago

The RISC-II thesis from 1983 references the 801, but it looks like IBM only started talking about it at around this time. The RISC-V project didn't start until 2010.

klelatti 4y ago
There is a funny quote from David Patterson in his Oral History > There was the 801 project was secretive. There is something called the 801, “What is it?” It was very hard to know even what they were doing. It was supposed to be very exciting, very breakthrough, but unless John Cocke came and told you what they were doing, you couldn't figure out anything about it. So, there was that kind of the mystery of the 801. I think word did get out in the late 1970s but not officially!
- rjsw 4y ago
  One of the references in the Katevenis thesis is "J. Cocke: Informal discussion on the IBM 801 mini-computer, U.C.Berkeley Campus, June 1983".
  - klelatti 4y ago
    From memory I think Cocke lectured at Berkeley (and maybe at Stanford too?)
abudabi123 4y ago
SC stood for Seymour Cray in RISC went one joke in his memory you can find on YT. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seymour_Cray https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seymour_Cray

classichasclass 4y ago

> the rest of the world only knows about the history of RISC-V" which is the only RISC we learned about in technical school in the late 90's. This surprises me, especially since RISC-V wasn't really a thing until around 2010. Not MIPS, SPARC, PowerPC, PA-RISC, ARM, all extant by this period and having a longer history, but RISC-V? What school was this?

cmrdporcupine 4y ago
I suspect the comment author typo'd and meant to write either MIPS or (more likely) Berkeley RISC.
p_l 4y ago
It's technically correct, because the "V" in RISC-V refers to it being the 5th project from UC Berkeley (after RISC-I, RISC-II, and tenuously naming SOAR as RISC-III, and either SPUR or VLSI-BAM as RISC-IV).

adrian_b 4y ago

Actually in this case IBM really has the right to brag about it, because there is no doubt that IBM 801 included the first RISC CPU, even if the name RISC was invented only several years later. Before IBM 801, there have been many simple CPUs, which, if they would be launched today, they would be called RISC CPUs, due to their simplicity. However for those old CPUs the simplicity was not intentional, but it was determined by the limitations of their manufacturing technology. On the other hand, the IBM 801 project, which has started in 1975, significant documentation about its principles of operation has been published during 1976 and a working prototype existed in 1978, was a project whose target was to intentionally reverse the trend towards more and more complex CPUs and investigate the ways by which greater simplicity may be in fact a method for reaching a higher performance. All the principles for obtaining high performance with a simpler CPU were discussed in the IBM 801 documentation 4 to 5 years before the RISC project at Berkeley (1980 to 1984) and the MIPS project at Stanford (1981 to 1984). Moreover, in March 1982 there has been a very important symposium where all the teams working at that time on RISC CPUs have presented their work, including the Berkeley RISC, Stanford MIPS and IBM 801 projects. The presentations from that symposium have determined the designers of the future ARM CPU to change their architecture from some kind of 6502 extension to a RISC architecture. They have been particularly impressed by the IBM 801 presentation, so instead of using weak addressing modes, like in the RISC and MIPS projects, they have included in ARM the much more powerful IBM 801 addressing modes (i.e. including modes with base register auto update). While John Cocke has not invented the word RISC when designing IBM 801, either he or another member of his team (which worked at the project that eventually became IBM POWER) has invented the word "superscalar", a few years later, in 1987, when the design target for CPUs had moved from being able to execute one instruction in a single clock cycle, like in the early RISC CPUs, to being able to execute multiple instructions per clock cycle.

cachvico 4y ago
> Moreover, in March 1982 there has been a very important symposium where all the teams working at that time on RISC CPUs have presented their work, including the Berkeley RISC, Stanford MIPS and IBM 801 projects. > The presentations from that symposium have determined the designers of the future ARM CPU to change their architecture from some kind of 6502 extension to a RISC architecture. That is absolutely fascinating. Are the papers from that conference available online?

panick21_ 4y ago

The early risk people gave a lot of credit to Crey.

brucehoult 4y ago

>in my head I was like "best keep that news to yourself pop, the rest of the world only knows about the history of RISC-V" which is the only RISC we learned about in technical school in the late 90's That must have been quite some trick, since RISC-V was created only in the 2010s!