Adrian (a.delete@this.acm.org) on July 24, 2022 9:53 pm wrote:
> Duane Sand (duanebsand.delete@this.gmail.com) on July 24, 2022 11:50 am wrote:
> > A friend worked in cpu engineering at IBM in the early 80's.
> > He recalls that there was a very fast microcontroller
> > known as "the 5 bit engine" that ran its instructions several times faster than the contemporary 3033 and
> > 3081 370-range mainframes it was used with. It was used as the microprogram core of the desk-sized IBM
> > 3060 operator and maintenance console of the 3033. Its speed apparently caused as much of a stir among
> > IBM engineers as the 801 risc project. Google does not find much about this speed demon. On comp.arch
> > in 1999, Julian Thomas responded to Del Cecchi's comment about IBM microcontrollers with
> > "Then there was the infamous 5 bit engine used in the 303x consoles!"
> >
> > My friend recalls this engine as having a 7nsec instruction time. And that engineering teams
> > resisted using its approach to build fast microcoded 370's instead of lots of hardware.
> >
> > What was this amazing thing? How was it so fast? How was it used? Did it need water cooling,
> > also? What were the reasons to not use similar techniques for the mainframes themselves? Could
> > a similar design be used in our latest cmos chips, with similarly fast single-thread results?
>
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> I believe that the "3060" name for that console might be wrong, as googling for
> it finds a much older IBM 3060 console, which was used in 1970 for IBM 370.
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> At bitsavers, there are a couple of manuals from 1979 for IBM 3033, which
> describe the console "IBM 3036", which appears to be that meant by you.
>
> Unfortunately, while those manuals give a detailed description of the external behavior of the IBM
> 3036 console, they do not give any information about how its microcoded processor is implemented.
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I want to add that, if the clock frequency was 140 MHz, then there is no doubt that the processor was implemented with MSI (Medium-Scale Integrated) oxide-insulated ECL (Emitter-Coupled Logic) circuits, like the Fairchild 100k family (launched in 1973) or the other ECL families equivalent with it, which were introduced later by Motorola and a few others.