The 801 was a RISC CPU designed by IBM in the 1970s, and used in various roles in IBM until the 1980s. Some engineers at IBM had favored using the 801 processor in the original IBM PC, which ultimately was based around the Intel 8088 CPU instead.
The 801 started as a pure research project led by John Cocke at the Thomas J. Watson Research Center in building 801. IBM was looking for ways to improve performance of its existing machines, with projec...
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The 801 was a RISC CPU designed by IBM in the 1970s, and used in various roles in IBM until the 1980s. Some engineers at IBM had favored using the 801 processor in the original IBM PC, which ultimately was based around the Intel 8088 CPU instead.
The 801 started as a pure research project led by John Cocke at the Thomas J. Watson Research Center in building 801. IBM was looking for ways to improve performance of its existing machines, with project team members studying traces of programs running on System/370 mainframes and looking at the compiler code. From this project came the idea that it was possible to make a very small and very fast core, which could then be used to implement the microcode for any machine.
The project subsequently developed the 'fast core' design as a CPU, also called the 801. The resulting CPU was operational by the summer of 1980 and was implemented using Motorola MECL-10K technology on large wire wrapped custom boards. The CPU was clocked at 66 ns cycles ...
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