IBM RS 6000

Greg Young, Nathan Einsig,

Rich Zizik, Ben Noble

IBM History

• IBM began in the state of New York on June 15, 1911

• Computing-Tabulating-Recording Company

• Thomas Watson joins company in 1914– Defines a new way of running a company

– Preached a positive outlook, and his favorite slogan, "THINK," became a mantra for C-T-R's employees.

• Company grew during great depression while the rest of the economy declined

• As far back as 1932 IBM was target for antitrust actions due to its enormous success

RS 6000 History• RS stands for RISC system

– RISC was produced in early 1974 for a telephone switching network

– Project terminated, but design was implemented with miniprocessors

– First machine to use RISC was the 801

• RISC was inexpensive, but had high performance– Separates data and instruction caches allowing high

bandwidth between memory and CPU

– Simplified pipeline allows faster processing

RS 6000 History

• RS 6000 used for the famous Deep Blue system

• May 1997 Deep Blue defeats World Chess Champion Garry Kasparov in a six game match

• Provoked a world debate debate on how close computers could come to approximating human intelligence

Role in Marketplace

• The RS 6000 is IBM’s flagship processor

• The RS 6000 chip is used in many of IBM’s servers and workstation platforms

• Ability to systematically explore vast numbers of variables lends itself to heavy processing tasks

Role in Marketplace

• As shown in Deep Blue the chip is capable of closely simulating human intelligence

• Capable of running complex autonomous programs

• Ideal for systems that are used for agent design and implementation

• Highly capable for running agent software such as Artificial Neural Networks

Role in Marketplace

• Used in:– air traffic control– modeling of financial data– development of new drug therapy– forecasting weather– NASA satellites– beating the worlds best chess player

Form of RISC Architecture

Predominantly RISC Some more complex instructions are

performed via software Second-generation RISC engine based on

the new IBM POWER architecture

Superscalar Architecture

Divides work among different functional units operating in parallel

Benefit– Improves Cycles/instruction– Higher Performance achieved

Superscalar Architecture

Drawback– Can Require Substantial Hardware

• more than can fit on one chip in the available CMOS technology

Solution– They use a compiler that delivers maximum

performance out of minimum hardware– Assigned registers to functional units

RS-6000 Processor

• Three Main Units– Fixed-Point Unit– Floating-Point Unit– Branch Unit– Each unit has its own register set

• Units Operate In Parallel– Synchronization signals passed between Fixed-

Point and Floating-Point Units

Fixed-Point Unit

• Performs data-address computations– For itself and the Floating-Point Unit

• Schedules Data Movement – For itself and the Floating-Point Unit

• Checks for Interrupt– Signals passed to Floating-Point Unit

• The two units operate in overlap manner

Floating-Point Unit

• Not a Coprocessor– design allows for enhanced floating-point

arithmetic

• Loads and Stores for Unit– done by Fixed-Point Unit

• 64 bit Multiply-Add Instruction– accomplishes (A * B) + C in one cycle

Branch Unit

• Overall Controller of Units– insures the integrity of program execution

Instruction Set

Adapted Instruction Set of IBM 801 Added more complex instruction

VLSI allowed for more complex instructions

All Instructions are 32 bits long Simple register oriented instruction set