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From: OrangeFish <OrangeFish@invalid.invalid>
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Subject: Re: Instruction Tracing
Date: Sun, 11 Aug 2024 09:44:27 -0400
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On 2024-08-10 21:57, John Levine wrote:
> It appears that Lawrence D'Oliveiro  <ldo@nz.invalid> said:
>> (ROMP was also one of those RISC architectures that had delayed branches,
>> along with MIPS, HP-PA and I think SPARC as well.)
>>
>> I have heard it said that the RT PC was a poor advertisement for the
>> benefits of RISC, and the joke was made that “RT” stood for “Reduced
>> Technology”.
> 
> I worked on AIX for the RT/PC. It was a pretty reasonable chip for the
> time, but it suffered greatly from internal IBM political fights which
> made it too little too late. AIX ran on top of a bloated virtual
> machine which made the whole thing too slow. There was skunkworks port
> of BSD that was supposed to be a lot better.
> 
> As far as the delayed branches and such, they made sense in the narrow
> time window when it was too expensive to put a cache on a workstation
> but that time came and went by the time the RT shipped.

A long time ago, I heard (or maybe read) that the original ROMP was 
chopped in half (the FP stuff was removed) by orders of marketing for 
some sort of h/w word-processor.  When that product bombed and the 
workstation market blossomed, the engineers "bolted" the FP stuff back 
on.  I cannot find the source.  Is there any truth to this?

OF