IBM RS 6000

1
IBM RS 6000

• Greg Young, Nathan Einsig,
• Rich Zizik, Ben Noble

2
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

3
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

4
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

5
Role in Marketplace

• The RS 6000 is IBMs flagship processor
• The RS 6000 chip is used in many of IBMs servers
  and workstation platforms
• Ability to systematically explore vast numbers of
  variables lends itself to heavy processing tasks

6
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

7
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

8
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

9
Superscalar Architecture

• Divides work among different functional units
  operating in parallel
• Benefit
• Improves Cycles/instruction
• Higher Performance achieved

10
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

11
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

12
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

13
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

14
Branch Unit

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

15
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