Adrian (a.delete@this.acm.org) on July 24, 2022 10:07 pm wrote:
> 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?
> >
> >
> > 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.
> >
> > 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.
> >
> 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.

Thanks, yes I did mean to write 3036, the console for 3033.