PRISM was a 32-bit RISC CPU design from Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC). It was the final outcome of a number of DEC-internal research projects from the 1982-85 time-frame, and was at the point of delivering silicon in 1988 when management canceled the project. The next year work on the DEC Alpha started, based heavily on the PRISM design. Reduced Instruction Set Computer (RISC), is a microprocessor CPU design philosophy that favors a smaller and simpler set of instructions that all take about the same amount of time to execute. ... CPU redirects here. ... Digital Equipment Corporation was a pioneering company in the American computer industry. ... DEC Alpha AXP 21064 Microprocessor The DEC Alpha, also known as the Alpha AXP, is a 64-bit RISC microprocessor originally developed and fabricated by Digital Equipment Corp. ...

Background

In the early 1980s DEC was a huge success, flush with cash and infused with a feeling of invincibility. Projects were started all over the company to chase the "next big thing", with little or no overall direction or managerial oversight.

RISC computing was one of those next big things, and in the period from 1982 to 1985 no less than four attempts were made to create a RISC chip at different divisions. Titan from DEC's Western Research Laboratory (WRL) in Palo Alto, California was a high-performance ECL based design that started in 1982, intended to run Unix. SAFE (Streamlined Architecture for Fast Execution) was a 64-bit design that started the same year, designed by Alan Kotok (of Spacewar! fame) and Dave Orbits and intended to run VMS. HR-32 (Hudson, RISC, 32-bit) started in 1984 by Rich Witek and Dan Dobberpuhl at the Hudson fab, intended to be used as a co-processor in VAX machine. The same year Dave Cutler started the CASCADE project at DECwest in Seattle. To meet Wikipedias quality standards, this article or section may require cleanup. ... ECL may stand for: Emitter Coupled Logic Embeddable Common Lisp ... Unix or UNIX is a computer operating system originally developed in the 1960s and 1970s by a group of AT&T employees at Bell Labs including Ken Thompson, Dennis Ritchie, and Douglas McIlroy. ... Spacewar! is one of the earliest video games for a digital computer. ... VMS is a three-letter abbreviation with multiple meanings, as described below: Virtual Memory System (another name for OpenVMS), an operating system Variable message sign, an electronic traffic sign often used on highways Visual Memory System (better known as Visual Memory Unit), a storage device for the Sega Dreamcast console... David Neil Cutler, Sr. ... City nickname Emerald City City bird Great Blue Heron City flower Dahlia City mottos The City of Flowers The City of Goodwill City song Seattle, the Peerless City Mayor Greg Nickels County King County Area   - Total   - Land   - Water   - % water 369. ...

PRISM

Eventually Cutler was asked to define a single RISC project in 1985, selecting Rich Witek as the chief architect. The design started as a 64-bit chip, but was later "downsized" to 32-bits. In August 1985 the first draft of a high-level design was delivered, and work began on the detailed design. The PRISM specification was developed over a period of many months by a five person team: Dave Cutler, Dave Orbits, Rich Witek, Dileep Bhandarkar, and Wayne Cardoza. This work was 98% done 1985-1986 and was heavily supported by simulations by Pete Benoit on a large VAXcluster.

On the integer side of things, the PRISM was a "me too" design in many ways, and displays a considerable similarity to the MIPS designs. Of the 32-bit instructions, the 6 highest and 5 lowest bits were the instruction, leaving the rest of the word for encoding either a constant or register locations. Sixty-four 32-bit registers were included, as opposed to thirty-two in the MIPS, but usage was otherwise similar. The PRISM and MIPS also lack the register windows that were a hallmark of the "other" design, Berkeley RISC/SPARC. The integers consist of the positive natural numbers (1, 2, 3, …), their negatives (−1, −2, −3, ...) and the number zero. ... In computer engineering, the use of register windows is a technique to improve the performance of a particularly common operation, the procedure call. ... Berkeley RISC was one of two seminal research projects into RISC-based microprocessor design taking place under ARPAs VLSI project. ... Sun UltraSPARC II Microprocessor Sun UltraSPARC T1 (Niagara 8 Core) SPARC (Scalable Processor ARChitecture) is a pure big-endian RISC microprocessor architecture originally designed in 1985 by Sun Microsystems. ...

The PRISM design was notable for several aspects of its instruction set, however. Notably, PRISM included Epicode (extended processor instruction code), which defined a number of "special" instructions intended to offer the operating system a stable ABI across multiple implementations. Epicode was given its own set of 22 32-bit registers to use. A set of vector processing instructions were later added as well, supported by an additional sixteen 64-bit vector registers that could be used in a variety of ways. An instruction set, or instruction set architecture (ISA), describes the aspects of a computer architecture visible to a programmer, including the native datatypes, instructions, registers, addressing modes, memory architecture, interrupt and exception handling, and external I/O (if any). ... To meet Wikipedias quality standards, this article or section may require cleanup. ... In computer software, an application binary interface (ABI) describes the low-level interface between an application program and the operating system, between an application and its libraries, or between component parts of the application. ... A vector processor, or array processor, is a CPU design that is able to run mathematical operations on multiple data elements simultaneously. ...

Two versions of the system were planned, DECwest worked on a "high-end" ECL implementation known as Crystal, while the Semiconductor Advanced Development team worked on MicroPRISM, a CMOS version. MicroPRISM was finished first and was sent for test fabbing in April 1988. Additionally, Culter led development on a new microkernel-based operating system code-named Mica, which was to offer Unix-like and VMS-like "personalities" on top of a common substrate of services. Static CMOS Inverter Complementary-symmetry/metal-oxide semiconductor (CMOS) (see-moss, IPA:), is a major class of integrated circuits. ... NASAs Glenn Research Center cleanroom. ... Graphical overview of a microkernel A microkernel is a minimal form of computer operating system kernel providing a set of primitives, or system calls, to implement basic operating system services such as address space management, thread management, and inter-process communication. ... To meet Wikipedias quality standards, this article or section may require cleanup. ...

Friction and cancellation

Throughout the PRISM period, DEC was involved in a major debate over the future direction of the company. As newer workstations were introduced, the performance benefit of the VAX was constantly eroded, and the price/performance ratio completely undermined. Different groups within the company debated how to best respond. Some advocated moving the VAX into the "high-end", abandoning the low-end to the workstations. Others suggested moving into the workstation market using a commodity processor. Still others suggested re-implementing the VAX on a RISC processor. A computer workstation, often colloquially referred to as workstation, is a high-end general-purpose microcomputer designed to be used by one person at a time and which offers higher performance than normally found in a personal computer, especially with respect to graphics, processing power and the ability to carry... In economics and engineering, the price/performance ratio refers to a products ability to deliver performance, of any sort, for its price. ...

This led to considerable problems with corporate immune response and turf wars between the various groups. Competition between the divisions delayed the architecture review, which wasn't closed until 1986. Work on associated support chips, the memory management unit and floating point unit, were later interrupted by yet another debate on whether or not the design should be 32 or 64-bit. The MicroPRISM design was not finalized until April 1988. Turf war is a term that describes a common problem in larger companies when two divisions fight for access to resources or capital. ... MMU, short for Memory Management Unit, is a class of computer hardware components responsible for handling memory accesses requested by the CPU. Among the functions of such devices are the translation of virtual addresses to physical addresses (i. ... A floating point unit (FPU) is a part of a CPU specially designed to carry out operations on floating point numbers. ...

By this point in time other groups in DEC, fed up with the constant in-fighting and delays, decided to create their own series of workstations based on the MIPS R3000, running a port of their existing Ultrix Unix-like operating system. From the initial meeting to a prototype machine took only 90 days, with full production able to start by January 1989. At a meeting reviewing the various projects in July 1988, the company decided to cancel PRISM, and continue with the MIPS workstations and high-end VAX products. A MIPS R4400 microprocessor made by Toshiba MIPS, for Microprocessor without interlocked pipeline stages, is a RISC microprocessor architecture developed by MIPS Computer Systems Inc. ... Ultrix was the brand name of Digital Equipment Corporations (DEC) native Unix systems. ... A Unix-like operating system is one that behaves in a manner similar to a Unix system, while not necessarily conforming to or being certified to any version of the Single UNIX Specification. ...

Ironically, every attempt to produce a faster VAX that could compete with newer workstations was essentially a failure. The VAX 9000 ran into delays, and by the time it shipped newer Unix workstations had already surpassed it in performance, at a tiny fraction of the cost (or size). Apparently aware of this danger, at the very same meeting where PRISM was canceled, Ken Olsen started a new project to continue exploring a RISC-based VAX. This indirectly led to the formation of the Alpha project the next year. Ken Olsen calling UNIX snake oil Kenneth H. Olsen (born on February 20, 1926) is an American engineer who cofounded Digital Equipment Corporation in 1957 with colleague Harlan Anderson. ...

Note

DEC PRISM should not be confused with Apollo PRISM, which was used in Apollo's DN10000 workstations. Apollo Computer, Inc. ... PRISM (Parallel Reduced Instruction Set Machine) was Apollo Computers high-performance CPU used in their DN10000 series workstations. ...

References

• E-mail with Bob Supnik
• MicroPrism