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MIPS R3000

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Re: MIPS R3000

#11

Post by fulafel »

segfaultbuserr wrote: post #3

Alternative history time: what if MIPS R4000 hasn't been killed by Pentium? Would we be running R10000-compatibles now?

Do you mean the MIPS line vs the x86 line of processors, or the R4000 vs Pentium specifically? I don't think the R4000 was "killed" by any competitor, especially the R4400 and VR4300 versions were really successful powering many SGI machines and the Nintendo 64.

Re: MIPS R3000

#12

Post by snvzz »

0815test wrote: post #8
snvzz wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Even more fun alternative history: What if Motorola didn't end 68000 with the 68060? 68060 released earlier than the pentium, and regardless it had about twice the performance per clock. But then Motorola decided to abandon 68k to focus on PowerPC. Going further back: What if IBM picked 68000 over the 8086 for the PC? I'm hoping RISC-V will put an end to x86. It's about time.

> Even more fun alternative history: What if Motorola didn't end 68000 with the 68060? Well, then we would all be doing our computing on Amigas, or at least on Atari Falcons. People blame C= for the downfall of the Amiga, but Motorola abandoning the 68k line was a much bigger factor, with no immediate way forward being evident at the time.

>People blame C= for the downfall of the Amiga

>but Motorola abandoning the 68k line was a much bigger factor

The engineers had plans going forward. C= just didn't allow it to happen. They scrapped everything.

Re: MIPS R3000

#13

Post by protomyth »

snvzz wrote: post #6
segfaultbuserr wrote: post #3

Alternative history time: what if MIPS R4000 hasn't been killed by Pentium? Would we be running R10000-compatibles now?

Even more fun alternative history: What if Motorola didn't end 68000 with the 68060? 68060 released earlier than the pentium, and regardless it had about twice the performance per clock. But then Motorola decided to abandon 68k to focus on PowerPC. Going further back: What if IBM picked 68000 over the 8086 for the PC? I'm hoping RISC-V will put an end to x86. It's about time.

I remember there was a 68000-series with a 56000 on chip. I would love to have seen a 68000 make it into the 64-bit era with a built in DSP. I did love programming those things. I would imagine some ColdFire-style pruning of the instruction set would have happened for the 64-bit era.

Re: MIPS R3000

#14

Post by protomyth »

tempguy9999 wrote: post #10
snvzz wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Even more fun alternative history: What if Motorola didn't end 68000 with the 68060? 68060 released earlier than the pentium, and regardless it had about twice the performance per clock. But then Motorola decided to abandon 68k to focus on PowerPC. Going further back: What if IBM picked 68000 over the 8086 for the PC? I'm hoping RISC-V will put an end to x86. It's about time.

I thought motorola did their own RISC chips, the 88000.

They did two that I know of, the 88000 and M.Core. The 88000 had some issues (I do believe floating point) and was really expensive.

Re: MIPS R3000

#16

Post by blackhaz »

snvzz wrote: post #12
0815test wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Even more fun alternative history: What if Motorola didn't end 68000 with the 68060? Well, then we would all be doing our computing on Amigas, or at least on Atari Falcons. People blame C= for the downfall of the Amiga, but Motorola abandoning the 68k line was a much bigger factor, with no immediate way forward being evident at the time.

>People blame C= for the downfall of the Amiga >but Motorola abandoning the 68k line was a much bigger factor The engineers had plans going forward. C= just didn't allow it to happen. They scrapped everything.

I'm happy my computing platform does not depend on a single corporation. The shock vibrations of those people who developed for beloved Amigas and other amazing but now dead platforms must still be echoing throughout the universe.

Re: MIPS R3000

#18

Post by kjs3 »

tempguy9999 wrote: post #10
snvzz wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Even more fun alternative history: What if Motorola didn't end 68000 with the 68060? 68060 released earlier than the pentium, and regardless it had about twice the performance per clock. But then Motorola decided to abandon 68k to focus on PowerPC. Going further back: What if IBM picked 68000 over the 8086 for the PC? I'm hoping RISC-V will put an end to x86. It's about time.

I thought motorola did their own RISC chips, the 88000.

They did for a short while, and it was the successor to the 68060 (the correct 'what if' is 'what if Motorola had continued the CISC 68k line instead of jumping on the RISC bandwagon). But in 1990 or so, Motorola joined with IBM and Apple to do PowerPC and dumped 88k, banking on (among other things) IBM and Apple to be solid customers in a crowded CPU market.

Re: MIPS R3000

#19

Post by cwt137 »

I remember reading a computer architecture book that used a fictional MIPS instruction set and used washing and drying clothes as an example of how to pipeline / do parallel instructions. Does anyone remember the name of that book?

Re: MIPS R3000

#20

Post by monocasa »

segfaultbuserr wrote: post #3

Alternative history time: what if MIPS R4000 hasn't been killed by Pentium? Would we be running R10000-compatibles now?

R10k killed itself, IMO. It had so many weird bugs that sort of look like today's Spectre vulnerabilities, but were so bad normal code had problems running. Like it would speculatively write into page tables and then be unable to unwind itself.
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