[rescue] Compaq Proliant 8000

[Joshua Boyd]

On Wed, Apr 28, 2004 at 03:06:58PM -0500, Jonathan C. Patschke wrote:
> On Wed, 28 Apr 2004, Dave McGuire wrote:
> 
> >    My memory may be suffering from bit rot, but I never saw it marketed
> > as a general-purpose CPU.  It was generally touted as a "Cray on a
> > chip".
> 
> So, it has vector-registers, or does it just have really ballsy FP?

It could would do 64bit integer SIMD stuff using the FP registers,
pretty much just like MMX.

I also seem to recall something about being able to retire two ALU
instructions per tick, plus either one MMXish instruction, or one FP add
and one FP multiply.

I think that if they had made it to use programmer controlled scratch
ram (say using SRAM) rather than a data cache it would have been much
easier to program.  I don't recall if it was a split or unified I/D
cache, but I do recall that uncertainties about the likely hood of a
piece of data being in the cache made it extremely difficult to figure
out how to best order the instructions.