xCellence in bits

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Entries Tagged as 'CPU'

CPU that had its own OS - The saga, part 4

October 23rd, 2007 · No Comments

This part is about a CPU that is still very actively developed and maintained.
The SPARC stands for Scalable Processor ARChitecture which was originally designed in 1985 by Sun Microsystems.
This is also a CPU that started its live as a 32-bit one and later became a fully 64-bit implementation. It’s design is very unique, even among […]

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Tags: CPU

CPU that had its own OS - The saga, part 3

September 19th, 2007 · No Comments

The CPU in this chapter is MIPS, which either stands for its founder company or for Microprocessor without Interlocked Pipeline States.
This comes from the clever instruction execution mechanism which uses a well-thought pipeline design which would never stall. In the beginning, it was a 32-bit design, like most RISC designs.
The first commercial version was the […]

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CPU that had its own OS - The saga, part 2

September 12th, 2007 · No Comments

This CPU had a lot of influence on the modern CPU design. It wasn’t less but the fastest CPU at its time. It’s no other than the DIGITAL Alpha or DEC Alpha for short.
It is fully clean 64-bit RISC design which is made with speed in mind. For example, it can only read/write from memory, […]

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CPU that had its own OS - The saga, part 1

September 11th, 2007 · No Comments

There are/were a few CPUs in the world which had own OSes. They had their own OS, architecture and company. Most of them are already forgotten or socialized to run open source OSes but in their own time, they had maybe a proprietary - OS, tailored just for them.In the few next entries, I’ll […]

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Tags: CPU

You needn’t to be big if you’re many…”

August 22nd, 2007 · No Comments


If you know a thing or two about CPUs, you may have seen assembly language. You may have even seen a block diagram how a CPU really works. You’re familiar with the concept of different ISAs, advantages and disadvantages. You’re also probably fascinated about multiprocessing and parallelism.
Well, this thing on the left does right […]

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Darwin, Alpha and Pegasos

July 3rd, 2007 · No Comments

No, these things aren’t competely related. And yet, they are.
What I am trying to do these days is, to compile a working Darwin system. Probably I should call it Mac OS X, that might sound familiar. It’s the open source foundation that makes OS X tick. It’s a full featured operating system itself, from […]

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Tags: CPU · OS