IBM has confirmed that it has approached some companies about their possible use of IBM patents in products that use RISC techniques – and according to an article in the San Francisco Examiner last week one of those companies is Sun Microsystems. Sun has reportedly received a letter from IBM expressing con cern that Sun and others may have infringed IBM’s RISC patents for RISC processors. But according to Sun, its Sparc Scalable Processor Architecture chip is based entirely on its own re search. Sun looks like a prime target for IBM because as well as being a designer of the Sparc, it is in alliance with AT&T against which IBM has promoted the Open Software Foundation. A spokesman for Pyramid Technology claimed that it had not re ceived anything from IBM concerning RISC, but like Sun, claimed that its RISC technology was based on proprietary research not connected with IBM’s RISC developments. Motorola, now pushing its new 88000 family of RISC microprocessors for all its worth told Associated Press All we know is essentially what we’ve read. And Advanced Micro Devices Inc with the 29000 RISC chip said we have not been contacted by them, so we’re kind of in the dark as to what might be going on. It was pleased by reports that IBM (its biggest customer) does not plan to try to shut down other companies using RISC. IBM research in the 1970s resulted what is generally thought to be the first RISC processor in 1975. This later led onto its implementation in IBM’s unreleased 801 minicomputer of 1979, which in turn led to the RT Personal Computer of 6150, which uses the ROMP Research/Office products division Microprocessor. However, some have cited Seymour Cray’s 6000 scientific processor line for Control Data as an early RISC design, thought to be the first example of a load and store architecture.
