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The Clipper C4 Processor
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The Clipper architecture was originally developed at Fairchild Semiconductor in Oct. 1985, and began shipping in 1986. The architecture was acquired by Intergraph Corporation in 1987.
The C400 processor combined two key architectural techniques to achieve a new level of performance. The first - superscalar instruction dispatch - boosted performance by executing more than one operation at a time. The second technique - superpipelined operation - used high clock rates to boost performance. Since complex tasks such as floating-point multiplications could not be done in a single, short clock cycle, the C400 would break long operations into many short pieces called stages.
Many 2nd generation RISC processors used one or the other of these techniques, but only the C400 Clipper used both.
References: Usenet announcement |
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