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PA-RISC Performance and History

PA-RISC traditionally was a fast architecture compared to other RISCs at the time, while others were often designed for higher frequencies.

Even though HP designers planned the PA-7300LC to out-perform every processor shipping today [1995] except Digital’s 21164, it was clear high-end RISC chips from a number of vendors are likely to surpass the 7300LC’s performance before it debuts. Intel’s advanced fabs made huge CPUs with very large on-chip L1 caches possible, breaking a long-standing HP tradition of no L1 on the CPU die but resulting in very high processor performance. The main competition of PA-RISC during the 1990s were other Unix platform vendors with their own RISC architectures: Sun SPARC (Solaris), Digital Alpha (Tru64 and OSF), SGI with MIPS (Irix), and IBM POWER (AIX and others).

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