4 ms·
> The R8000 is not a CPU in the traditional sense. It is a processor, but that processor is comprised of many individual chips And retrocomputing geeks (and ju
by msla 2y ago
> The R8000 is not a CPU in the traditional sense. It is a processor, but that processor is comprised of many individual chips
And retrocomputing geeks (and just any geek sufficiently old) got rueful grins on their faces.
This is traditional, in the sense of being old-fashioned. CPUs were built out of discrete components back when that meant individual vacuum tubes, discrete solid-state components, and then, finally, discrete chips. Thousands of individual SSI chips in computers like the Apollo Guidance Computer. Even after the first single-chip CPU was developed, larger computers still used multi-chip CPUs, like the PDP-11 architecture being implemented on four chips in the LSI-11 chipset.
https://gunkies.org/wiki/LSI-11_chip_set https://gunkies.org/wiki/LSI-11_chip_set
That's before some people were born, I guess, so we have this.
- kev009 2y agoIBM's POWER and POWER2 were also many (8-10 depending) chips in CMOS which was an exotic approach as most RISCs had converged to single die microprocessors but made it possible to beat a lot of vendors in the superscalar punch and push the complexity of SMP out a while (for both vendor and user). The POWER2SC converged it all onto one die, and then eventually IBM became well known for exotic RISC MCMs. In the mainframes the TCM is somewhat famous, really beautiful Bipolar designs with relatively low gate count but a ton of high performing dice (and high heat, hence TCM) on an exotic MCM.