Word: silicones
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...Silicon Valley has not seen such a bumper crop since it stopped growing peaches and prunes and began producing computer chips. Hardly a week has gone by this spring without a ballyhooed announcement of a new semiconductor or a line of high-speed computers. At the center of the excitement is a new breed of microprocessors that promises to give computer manufacturers their biggest performance boost in a decade. Lightning fast, the chips make it possible to put the power of ten to 20 refrigerator-size minicomputers into a single desktop-size machine...
...performance breakthroughs? In a word: RISC, for reduced instruction set computer. RISC is not a new technology, but a fresh approach to computing that challenges 25 years of semiconductor design. It focuses on a computer's most basic commands: the instructions that are embedded, or hard-wired, into the silicon circuitry of the machine's central processing unit. The first computers made do with a handful of primitive commands, such as LOAD, ADD and STORE, which programmers combined to perform complex tasks. Lacking a command to multiply 6 times 5, for example, they had to instruct their computers...
Over the years, the basic instruction sets grew in length, as miniaturization allowed computer designers to etch more circuits into silicon chips. The most advanced microprocessors began to resemble state-of-the-art calculators that could compute everything from square roots to compound interest at the touch of a button. By the time Digital Equipment introduced its best-selling VAX 11/780 computer in 1977, the machine's instruction set had swelled to 304 commands...
...almost everybody. Sun, a company best known for its engineering computers, got into the chip business last summer when it began licensing a RISC processor to AT&T, Unisys and Xerox. MIPS, which introduced its second generation of the chips last month, supplies microprocessors to Tandem, Prime, and Silicon Graphics. Hewlett-Packard has built an entire line of computers around RISC technology...
...breed of lightning- fast silicon chips challenges 25 years of computer design. -- Has the picture phone finally arrived...