<div dir="ltr"><div>I did just find this on page 33 of "The PowerPC Macintosh Book" by Stephan Somogyi (1994, Addison-Wesley Publishing):</div><div><br></div><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0px 0px 0px 0.8ex;border-left:1px solid rgb(204,204,204);padding-left:1ex"><div>IBM's POWER seven-chip set, known as RIOS - which is the Spanish word for "rivers" and doesn't have any particular code-name significance - was completely unsuitable for high-volume, low-cost products. These days, RIOS is often referred to as Power1 to distinguish it from Power2, a more recent multichip implementation of the POWER architecture. A project known as RSC, for RIOS single-chip, was already in development at IBM when the Apple/IBM/Motorola negotiations began. The RSC's design goal, however, was to create a straightforward implementation of RIOS without significant modifications.</div></blockquote><div> </div></div><br><div class="gmail_quote"><div dir="ltr" class="gmail_attr">On Thu, Mar 16, 2023 at 11:08 AM Nathan Raymond <<a href="mailto:nraymond@gmail.com">nraymond@gmail.com</a>> wrote:<br></div><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0px 0px 0px 0.8ex;border-left:1px solid rgb(204,204,204);padding-left:1ex"><div dir="ltr"><div>Great question. I did a lot of searches just now, and if I had to guess it was an internal code name that was picked up by the press (such as InfoWorld). The "Mainframe Dictionary" maintained by Software Diversified Services has this entry:<br><br><a href="https://support.sdsusa.com/support/dictionary/r/" target="_blank">https://support.sdsusa.com/support/dictionary/r/</a><br><br><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0px 0px 0px 0.8ex;border-left:1px solid rgb(204,204,204);padding-left:1ex">Rios: IBM project which finally, in February 1990, produced the RS/6000, now part of eserver pSeries. Also used to refer to the architecture and the processor chip used in the RS/6000.</blockquote></div><div><br></div><div>This "History of Microcomputers 1987-1990" has this entry:<br><br><a href="https://emusee.org/comphis6.html" target="_blank">https://emusee.org/comphis6.html</a><br><br><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0px 0px 0px 0.8ex;border-left:1px solid rgb(204,204,204);padding-left:1ex">(month unknown), 1990: IBM unveils its new RISC-based workstation line, the RS/6000. Development work had been done under code name "America" for the RISC chip research, and "RIOS" for systems using the America technology. The architecture of the systems is given the name POWER, standing for Performance Optimization With Enhanced RISC.<br></blockquote></div><div><br></div><div>This "27 Years of IBM RISC" page mentions it this way:</div><div><br></div><div><a href="http://ps-2.kev009.com/rootvg/column_risc.htm" target="_blank">http://ps-2.kev009.com/rootvg/column_risc.htm</a></div><div><br></div><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0px 0px 0px 0.8ex;border-left:1px solid rgb(204,204,204);padding-left:1ex"><div>1985 America<br>Based on the experimental design of the 801 and ACS ideas the development laboratory in Austin completed a first prototype, where it evolved into the superscalar (Instructions are handled paralel) RISC System/6000 (RS/6000) processor that was introduced into the market in 1990. Development work had been done under code name "America" for the RISC chip research, and "RIOS" for systems using the America technology.</div></blockquote><div><br></div><div>Wikipedia covers it this way:</div><div><br></div><div><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_Power_microprocessors" target="_blank">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_Power_microprocessors</a></div><div><br></div><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0px 0px 0px 0.8ex;border-left:1px solid rgb(204,204,204);padding-left:1ex"><div>The America project<br></div><div> In 1985, research on a second-generation RISC architecture started at
the IBM Thomas J. Watson Research Center, producing the "AMERICA
architecture". In 1986, IBM Austin started developing the RS/6000 series
computers based on that architecture. This was to become the first
POWER processors using the first POWER ISA.</div></blockquote><div><br></div><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0px 0px 0px 0.8ex;border-left:1px solid rgb(204,204,204);padding-left:1ex"><div>POWER</div><div>The first IBM computers to incorporate the POWER ISA are the RISC System/6000 or RS/6000 series. They were released in February 1990. These RS/6000 computers were divided into two classes, POWERstation workstations and POWERserver servers. The first RS/6000 CPU has 2 configurations, called the "RIOS-1" and "RIOS.9" (or more commonly the POWER1 CPU). A RIOS-1 configuration has a total of 10 discrete chips: an instruction cache chip, fixed-point chip, floating-point chip, 4 data L1 cache chips, storage control chip, input/output chips, and a clock chip. The lower cost RIOS.9 configuration has 8 discrete chips: an instruction cache chip, fixed-point chip, floating-point chip, 2 data cache chips, storage control chip, input/output chip, and a clock chip. </div></blockquote><div><br></div><div>Wikipedia doesn't attempt to unpack RIOS beyond that.<br></div><div><br></div><div>If you go to IBM's archives, there is no mention of RIOS in "A Brief History of RISC, the IBM RS/6000 and the IBM eServer pSeries" or in "Dictionary of IBM and Computing Terminology", which backs up the idea that it was more of an internal code name:</div><div><br></div><div><a href="https://www.ibm.com/ibm/history/documents/index.html" target="_blank">https://www.ibm.com/ibm/history/documents/index.html</a></div><div><br></div><div>GCC documentation refers to it here as both the "'rios' chip set" and as a cpu_type to be passed to the -mcpu option:</div><div><br></div><div><a href="https://gcc.gnu.org/onlinedocs/gcc-4.3.6/gcc/RS_002f6000-and-PowerPC-Options.html" target="_blank">https://gcc.gnu.org/onlinedocs/gcc-4.3.6/gcc/RS_002f6000-and-PowerPC-Options.html</a></div><div><br></div><div>Going back to an article before the RS/6000 came out (Jan 22, 1990), it was mentioned this way:</div><div><br></div><div><a href="https://techmonitor.ai/technology/ibms_rios_takes_role_of_spectre_at_uniforum_feast" target="_blank">https://techmonitor.ai/technology/ibms_rios_takes_role_of_spectre_at_uniforum_feast</a></div><div><br></div><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0px 0px 0px 0.8ex;border-left:1px solid rgb(204,204,204);padding-left:1ex"><div>The biggest no-show at the UniForum show which opens in Washington today
– unless IBM changes it’s mind in a hurry or decides to hide the thing
somewhere off-stand – is IBM’s forthcoming Rios Unix family, which
according to InfoWorld will be called the System/6000 Power family...</div></blockquote><div><br></div><div>I thought for sure the Computer History Museum would have something, but there wasn't much in the "IBM 801 Microprocessor Oral History Panel":</div><div><br></div><div><a href="https://www.computerhistory.org/collections/catalog/102740048" target="_blank">https://www.computerhistory.org/collections/catalog/102740048</a></div><div><br></div><div>They talk about America:</div><div><br></div><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0px 0px 0px 0.8ex;border-left:1px solid rgb(204,204,204);padding-left:1ex"><div>P. Markstein: The RS/6000, which we named America, because John said nobody would dare kill a project named America. <laughter><br>...<br></div></blockquote><div><br></div><div>and just mention RIOS:</div><div><br></div><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0px 0px 0px 0.8ex;border-left:1px solid rgb(204,204,204);padding-left:1ex"><div>Oehler: I don't have any clear vision of what happened. Sometimes I just don't remember some of the detail. But the thing about the 6000 going to PC was that was another revolution in the architecture in things that we had another opportunity to fix before we got to the full RIOS, the RS/6000 machine.</div></blockquote><div><br></div><div> Someone who worked at IBM must know though?</div><div><br></div><div>- Nate<br></div></div><br><div class="gmail_quote"><div dir="ltr" class="gmail_attr">On Thu, Mar 16, 2023 at 9:12 AM Scott Quinn via rescue <<a href="mailto:rescue@sunhelp.org" target="_blank">rescue@sunhelp.org</a>> wrote:<br></div><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0px 0px 0px 0.8ex;border-left:1px solid rgb(204,204,204);padding-left:1ex"><div><div style="font-family:Arial,Helvetica,sans-serif;font-size:16px"><div dir="ltr">When you look at older POWER articles/documentation they sometimes use the acronym RIOS instead to refer to the processor, but I haven't found what it stands for yet. Anyone know?</div></div></div>_______________________________________________<br>
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