For some reason, I always had dismissed the Intergraph workstations as ``not worth looking at''.
But then, a friend of mine salvaged one and insisted demonstrating it to me. And then I realized (with the help of the manuals on bitsavers) how awesome the Clipper architecture was. Ahead of its time, basically bringing 1990 performance and standards back in 1986 and avoiding most of the pitfalls of the early RISC cpus. Yes, really: although it was designed to compete against VAX, and did not pay attention to the Berkeley RISC designs, the Clipper architecture is a many-registers fast context switch, load/store without interlocks or delay slots, but variable yet predictable instruction length, architecture. As a die-hard 88000 person, it rings many bells and looks to me like what 88000 w/could have been, 3-4 years earlier. And all of this as 33MHz, while Digital as well as Motorola was having a hard time moving from 20MHz to 25MHz...
And now that I have been enlightened, I would like to get my hands on a Clipper-based system, and at least be able to compile and run some code to really feel how good the hardware is.
If you know of such a system in working condition, lacking a good home, preferrably in Europe, please let me know.
But then, a friend of mine salvaged one and insisted demonstrating it to me. And then I realized (with the help of the manuals on bitsavers) how awesome the Clipper architecture was. Ahead of its time, basically bringing 1990 performance and standards back in 1986 and avoiding most of the pitfalls of the early RISC cpus. Yes, really: although it was designed to compete against VAX, and did not pay attention to the Berkeley RISC designs, the Clipper architecture is a many-registers fast context switch, load/store without interlocks or delay slots, but variable yet predictable instruction length, architecture. As a die-hard 88000 person, it rings many bells and looks to me like what 88000 w/could have been, 3-4 years earlier. And all of this as 33MHz, while Digital as well as Motorola was having a hard time moving from 20MHz to 25MHz...
And now that I have been enlightened, I would like to get my hands on a Clipper-based system, and at least be able to compile and run some code to really feel how good the hardware is.
If you know of such a system in working condition, lacking a good home, preferrably in Europe, please let me know.
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R4000
R4400
R4400
R8000
R10000
R4000PC
R4000SC
R5000SC
R5000
RM7000
2xR10000
R12000
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2x2xR10000
R16000
among more than 150 machines : Apollo, Be, Data General, Digital, HP, IBM, MIPS before SGI , Motorola, NeXT, SGI, Solbourne, Sun...
...
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