Richard G. Bahr

The DN 10000TX: a new high-performance PRISM processor

The Hewlett-Packard DN 10000TX scales the original DN 10000 processor design to twice the performance through the use of more aggressive semiconductor technologies. The original eleven VLSI chip CPU design has been recast onto eight VLSI chips including a 1.0- mu m structured-custom chip, five submicron gate arrays, and one bipolar floating-point chip. Continuing to exploit the PRISM architecture to achieve multiple operations per cycle, the 36.36 MHz operation provides performance comparable to that of much higher frequency processors. The authors review the DN 10000 product family, and then present in some detail the goals, design approach, and processor implementation of the DN 10000TX.<<ETX>>