[email protected] (Alan Altmark) writes: > Yet you never hear "millicode" being applied to storage controllers or > other parts outside of the processor. And you know as well as I do > that they aren't replacing microcode on the processor chips. They're > replacing the OS and the applications that use them. But we continue > to call it "microcode." The joke's on us....
re: http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2014m.html#161 Slushware http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2014m.html#163 Slushware http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2014m.html#164 Slushware http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2014m.html#166 Slushware 79/80 there was effort to replace the myriad of internal microprocessors with 801/risc ... 801 Iliad chips for the low & mid-range 370s, 801 ROMP chip for the follow-on to the displaywriter, new 801 chip for the AS/400 (follow-on to s/36 & s/38), 801 chips for wide variety of (disk, tape, communication, etc) controlers, etc. For various reasons all of these failed and things returned to business as usual with various CISC chips ... and started to see 801 chip engineers leaving to other vendors to work on risc programs there. the followon to 4331/4341, 4361&4381 were originally to be 801 microprocessors with 370 simulation done in 801 software ... rather than whatever preceeding CISC processors were used ("vertical microcode" that avg. ten native instructions per 370 instruction). There was even work on JIT (just in time dynamic compiling of 370 into native 801/risc) ... somewhat analogous to what is seen with some modern day JAVA. I helped with white paper that shot down the use of 801/Iliad for 4381 ... the story was that CISC chips were getting sophisticated enough that much of 370 instructions could be directly implemented in silicon ... rather than having to be all simulation in microcode (software) ... resulting in significant better price/performance. as/400 eventually abandoned 801/risc implementation, changing to traditional CISC microprocessor. However, a decade later AS/400 did move over to 801/risc with power/pc. past 801/risc, iliad, romp, rios, power, etc posts http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/subtopic.html#801 A little later, IBM Germany did the (native) 370 "ROMAN" chipset. Somehow somebody in Nixdorf (did 370 clones) came into possession of detailed specs. for ROMAN. He sent it to somebody at Amdahl that he had been working with ... who presented it to me to return to the rightful owners (trying to avoid any litigation that might come from having come into the possession of the document). Turns out that I was trying to get a project going to package a few dozen "ROMAN" chipsets in a rack. It was sort of followon to something I had gotten dragged into a few years earlier. I had access to engineering 4341 (before first customer ship) and got asked to do some benchmarking for LLNL that was looking at getting 70 4341s for compute farm (sort of precursor to modern grid & supercomputing). A cluster of 4341s had more computer power than high-end mainframes, were much cheaper, and required much less floor space and environmentals. old 4341 email http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/lhwemail.html#4341 later I got involved in doing something similar ... but packing as many 801/RIOS chips in a rack as possible (instead of 370/ROMAN). some old email http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/lhwemail.html#medusa -- virtualization experience starting Jan1968, online at home since Mar1970 ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to [email protected] with the message: INFO IBM-MAIN
