Hewlett-Packard Co will be including more features into its forthcoming PA-8000 Precision Architecture RISC than any other RISC vendor has done thus far, the Microprocessor Report has learned. It says the PA-8000, Hewlett-Packard’s first 64-bit part, and the company’s first completely new microprocessor design since 1991 – therefore defined as PA 2.0 – will carry the company until first fruits of its Intel Corp alliance arrive in 1998. Hewlett-Packard claims 8000 will be the fastest in its generation, although it may have to go some to achieve that, by then requiring up to 400 SPECint92, the newsletter estimates. System-based shipments are not expected before mid-1996 in any case. The PA-8000 shares the decoupled architecture of the MIPS Technologies Inc R10000, and is capable of processing four instructions per cycle and can do out-of-order execution. Pushing beyond MIPS, it also has dual floating-point units and load and store pipes – but there’s no on-chip cache. First silicon is due early next year, though the part has not been taped out yet.
