History
The original PRISM design was introduced in 1988 in the one-to-four-CPU Apollo DN10000 workstations. The "DN" in the name refers to "Domain Node", Domain/OS being the Unix-like operating system used on all of Apollo's machines. Note that PRISM was a multi-chip CPU board, not a single microprocessor; this was fairly common for high-end CPUs at the time.
About 1000 DN10000's were sold.
PRISM II, running at twice the clock speed, was delayed by problems in fabing, and then eventually cancelled after the HP purchase. Nevertheless, several features of the PRISM design were put into later generations of the HP-PA architecture, and the two main proponents of the VLIW concept, Intel and HP, later collaborated on the Itanium.
The PRISM was generally the fastest CPU on the market during its short life-span. In comparison with common RISC designs of the era, the PRISM was effectively two CPUs in one, making it roughly double the performance of a RISC CPU running at the same clock speed.
Read more about this topic: Apollo PRISM
Famous quotes containing the word history:
“To care for the quarrels of the past, to identify oneself passionately with a cause that became, politically speaking, a losing cause with the birth of the modern world, is to experience a kind of straining against reality, a rebellious nonconformity that, again, is rare in America, where children are instructed in the virtues of the system they live under, as though history had achieved a happy ending in American civics.”
—Mary McCarthy (1912–1989)
“Whenever we read the obscene stories, the voluptuous debaucheries, the cruel and torturous executions, the unrelenting vindictiveness, with which more than half the Bible is filled, it would be more consistent that we called it the word of a demon than the Word of God. It is a history of wickedness that has served to corrupt and brutalize mankind.”
—Thomas Paine (1737–1809)
“Every generation rewrites the past. In easy times history is more or less of an ornamental art, but in times of danger we are driven to the written record by a pressing need to find answers to the riddles of today.... In times of change and danger when there is a quicksand of fear under men’s reasoning, a sense of continuity with generations gone before can stretch like a lifeline across the scary present and get us past that idiot delusion of the exceptional Now that blocks good thinking.”
—John Dos Passos (1896–1970)