On Wed, Sep 08, 2004 at 04:09:59PM -0500, Ron Johnson wrote:
http://www3.sk.sympatico.ca/jbayko/cpu5.html#Sec5Part4
"Part IV: IBM RS/6000 POWER chips (1990). . . ."
"Thirty two 32-bit registers were defined for the POWER1 integer
unit, which also included certain string operations, as well as
all load/store operations."
Blah blah blah POWER2
"It was superceded by the POWER3 (Early 1998), with eight functional
units (two FPU, three integer (two single cycle, one multicycle),
two load/store, and branch unit), but capable of operating at much
higher clock speeds. In addition, a 64 bit version, the PowerPC
A35 (Apache), was designed for the AS/400 E series"
So, the first 64 bit POWER chips arrived 8 years after the 32
bit versions.
1998 seems like a fairly resonable time to start getting into 64bit. I
guess it does indicate the power wasn't designed as 64bit to begin with,
but seems to have been designed well enough that extending it later was
reasonable to do.
Well, sparc64 has been around an awful long time. Adding PAE-like hacks seems
Since 1995.
There were largish SMP SPARC32 boxen for many years before the
SPARC64 came into existence. I can't find any references on the
web, but some of those big boxen had to have more than 4GB RAM.
I wonder how much 4GB ram would have cost in 1995 or even 1998. I
remember getting 16M for a 486 for $600 in 1992. I think it was 1996
when I got 128M for about the same amount. The price lists I found once
for Decstation 5000 boxes had ram listed at around $50000 for 128M in
1991.
Even in 1995 4GB would have been a rather expensive amount of ram even
for a high end sparc or power machine.