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A Real PowerBook: The Macintosh Application Environment on a Pa-RISC Laptop
I like the Power ISA very much, but there's nothing architecturally obvious to say that the next natural step from the Motorola 68000 family...
Being effectively a hopped-up PA-7100LC, it inherits most of the characteristics of the earlier chip including a two-way superscalar design, bi-endian support, two asymmetric ALUs, a slightly gimped FPU (the "coprocessor" in the POST summary) with greater double precision latency, and MAX-1 multimedia SIMD instructions. Other Apple computers and hardware visible in the movie include a SuperMac monitor and AppleDesign keyboard as the console of the CIA's standalone terminal (and what might have been a Kensington TurboMouse ADB trackball), and a boxed Power Macintosh 8100 in the TGV's baggage hold. Although no Tadpole or RDI laptop sold in massive commodity numbers, HP's concern over the looming one instruction per cycle limit caused them to begin moving away from PA-RISC to their experiments with EPIC VLIW, culminating in the fiddly and underwhelming early generation of Itanium.
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