The PSC1000 RISC from Patriot Scientific Corp remains a processor in search of a role, but one of the things Java is intended to do is to liberate the world from the Wintel straitjacket and let 100 diverse operating systems and processors bloom. So the San Diego company is looking to the Java Internet Appliance market to secure the future of the PSC1000, formerly rather flippantly called ShBoom. It says it is is already developing a product aimed at the Java Internet appliance market, working closely with another firm in the development of a specific product using the PSC1000 as an integral part of the system. And Patriot Scientific comes armed with its fourth issued US patent on the microprocessor technology, with several more still pending. The new patent provides significant protection for the hierarchical memory implementation of stacks for microprocessors – the PSC1000 keeps the top stack elements in registers for very fast access; deeper stack elements are in on-chip RAM for fast access, and only the deepest elements are in external memory. Key attractions claimed for the PSC1000 are that it runs Java applications significantly faster and with lower power consumption than existing microprocessors and does not need software interpreters or compilers as existing microprocessors do, since it can run Java byte codes directly. The 32-bit microprocessors are claimed to be the first to combine the best features of RISC and zero- operand stack architectures, using a computation stack that enables instructions to be one byte in length instead of four, to reduce program size and the memory bandwidth required to feed instructions to the processor. It is also claimed provides a significant advantage for stack-based software or hardware architectures like the Java virtual machine since it maps very closely to the native instructions of the architecture.
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