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
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