![]() ![]() The microkernel design meant that the kernel handled only very basic exchanges between the hardware and other pieces of software. Martin selected the Motorola 88100 processor and planned to use four in the new machine.Įven before NeXT started creating NeXTstep, Apple was creating an operating system based on the microkernel Mach, named Pink. The machine was to be a showcase of top of the line technology. ![]() Jaguar would use a preexisting RISC design to create a multiprocessor workstation. Hugh Martin, a microprocessor expert personally recruited by John Sculley, was tapped to lead the successor to Aquarius, Jaguar (right). A team of fifty engineers was assembled, and John Sculley even authorized the acquisition of a Cray supercomputer to aid in designing the processor, yet little progress was made. Incredibly ambitious, the project, code named Aquarius, would create a four core RISC processor. In 1986, Apple planned a response to the stagnating 68000 line and started a project to replace the processor. ![]() The promised revision to the line, the 68040, was pushed back further and further, and Apple had little confidence that Motorola would be able to consistently produce processors competitive with the next generation x86 processors. The Motorola 680×0 processor Apple used in its Macintosh computers was beginning to show its age. Apple Looks at RISCĪpple reached the same conclusions about RISC design that IBM had in the mid-seventies. Few companies adopted the RT PC or 801 until 1990, when IBM released PowerPC. The first product that used the 801 was the IBM RT PC, which used the chip with a standard PC AT bus. The 801 was ready for release in 1977 and performed at 15 MIPS, about as fast as the Quadra 605 that Apple had introduced more than a decade later. As a result of eliminating seldom used instructions, the IBM 801 had slightly less than a hundred commands, while Intel’s 8086 had over 400. John Cocke studied several processor designs of the day and realized that the more complex commands in ordinary processors were rarely used and only added complexity to the chip, which served to slow it down. By the mid-1970s it was believed that microprocessors had become as complex and feature rich as they ever would, so further advances would have to come in the form of miniaturization or fundamental shifts in thinking about processor design. The story of the PowerPC began in the early seventies when John Cocke and his team at IBM began designing one of the earliest RISC processors, the 801. Here’s how IBM’s RISC project became the heart of the Mac. With the Motorola 680×0 architecture running out of steam and Motorola’s 88000 making haste slowly, Apple had to look a bit further afield for its next processor architecture. ![]()
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