[HN Gopher] The First 'Apple Silicon' - The Aquarius Processor P...
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       The First 'Apple Silicon' - The Aquarius Processor Project
        
       Author : tim_sw
       Score  : 48 points
       Date   : 2023-05-28 13:59 UTC (9 hours ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (thechipletter.substack.com)
 (TXT) w3m dump (thechipletter.substack.com)
        
       | Taniwha wrote:
       | isn't this the hobbit/crisp core that was supposed to go in the
       | newton?
        
         | joezydeco wrote:
         | No, Hobbit was a descendent of the AT&T Bellmac processor.
        
           | fidotron wrote:
           | The end fate of Hobbit at Apple is not unrelated to ARM
           | either (https://tompittard.com/media) :
           | 
           | > "Tom Pittard and Paul Gavarini of ATG spotted the ARM
           | architecture (late 1985), rightly inferring Acorn had shared
           | 6502 experience and motives. Investigation began. Pittard and
           | Gavarini went to work on the Mobius project. Their two-year
           | effort created a board using a VLSI Technology ARM2 chip plus
           | software emulating the entire Apple desktop computer lineup:
           | a 6502 or 65C816 running Apple II code, and a 68000 running
           | Mac code. All emulated code ran faster on the ARM2 processor
           | than the corresponding native versions. ... Mobius terminated
           | quietly - but Pittard kept the prototype in his office." ...
           | "In the afterglow of Mobius, Tom Pittard did a presentation
           | for Apple engineering teams on his benchmarks a few months
           | after work halted. Heads turned. Of particular note were the
           | results from Pittard's Lisp benchmarks on ARM2." ... "Tesler
           | [Lary Tesler], a veteran of Xerox PARC and an expert on GUIs,
           | saw Pittard's results. He grasped where the ARM architecture
           | could take Newton [Apples first handheld device]"... "Tesler
           | had an endgame in mind... He based that on the status of
           | Hobbit [a competing processor design], Tom Pittard's ARM2
           | benchmark results, and roadmap discussions with the ARM
           | development team."
        
           | Taniwha wrote:
           | We hired one of the guys who worked on Apple's hobbit/crisp
           | or the newton, he'd git his cpu back from the fab, worked
           | first time, but politics suddenly went ARM - he quit
        
       | jasoneckert wrote:
       | The author of the article paints a picture of a situation in
       | which expensive hardware was purchased on a whim without much
       | planning beforehand. This hardware was ill suited to their task,
       | and ultimately led to failure of the project while others (e.g.,
       | ARM) were quickly producing RISC designs with low budgets.
       | 
       | This sort of thing isn't uncommon in larger organizations that
       | have money to burn on R&D. As a result, it's probably safe to say
       | Apple was in a position that allowed them to burn a lot of money
       | in the late 1980s.
        
         | sillywalk wrote:
         | Seymour Cray was reported to have used a Mac for part of the
         | Cray Supercomputer design work.
        
         | danw1979 wrote:
         | > In due course, the team found that the Sun workstations that
         | they attached to the supercomputer could run their software
         | just as quickly as the Cray itself.
        
         | twoodfin wrote:
         | I'm going to give the technical management the benefit of the
         | doubt here, and assume the $15M Cray wasn't primarily for chip
         | design, but rather architectural simulation.
         | 
         | This was intended to be a parallel system across several
         | layers, while wrapping in a number of novel architectural
         | ideas. It would not have been ridiculous to assume having a
         | massively parallel supercomputer to experiment with those ideas
         | more quickly would be worth the expense.
        
         | wrs wrote:
         | The Cray was put to good use doing plastic injection molding
         | simulations that saved millions of dollars on prototype mold
         | tools. This was the era when the desktop Mac folks were making
         | insanely complex screwless plastic cases that basically snapped
         | together.
        
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       (page generated 2023-05-28 23:01 UTC)