Mark Roulo (nothanks.delete@this.xxx.com) on August 10, 2022 9:34 am wrote:
> Doug S (foo.delete@this.bar.bar) on August 10, 2022 9:09 am wrote:
> > Michael S (already5chosen.delete@this.yahoo.com) on August 10, 2022 6:54 am wrote:
> > > Doug S (foo.delete@this.bar.bar) on August 9, 2022 9:19 pm wrote:
> > > > Björn Ragnar Björnsson (bjorn.ragnar.delete@this.gmail.com) on August 9, 2022 2:36 pm wrote:
> > > > > "Digital intended the architecture to support a one-thousandfold increase in performance
> > > > > over twenty-five years. To ensure this, any architectural feature that impeded multiple
> > > > > instruction issue, clock rate or multiprocessing was removed."
> > > >
> > > >
> > > > That's a good thing though, in the long run. Because the
> > > > whole industry benefits as much from seeing what NOT
> > > > to do as seeing what to do. They took the RISC philosophy
> > > > (which was married closely to the speed demon philosophy
> > > > at the time) to its logical extreme, kind of like how Intel's 432 took CISC to its logical extreme.
> > > >
> > >
> > > Out of Alpha 21064 approximate contemporaries, I would think about IBM ES/9000 (CISC) water-cooled
> > > models as an ultimate Speed Demon and about IBM (also!) POWER2 (RISC) as an ultimate Brainiac.
> >
> >
> > Was the ES/9000 really architected to be a "speed demon" or simply overengineered
> > with features like water cooling and bipolar transistors?
> >
> > An Apple M2 made in a hypothetical modern equivalent of a bipolar process that allowed operating
> > at much higher frequencies in exchange for much higher power draw, cooled with LN2 to keep it
> > from melting, wouldn't be a speed demon no matter how high you were able to clock it.
>
> If by ES/9000 we mean the S/390 CPU

S/390 architecture is an instruction set architecture rather than a model of computer.
Computers with S/390 architecture were called 3090 and ES/9000 series. The later had very many models. Some of them had high (for the time) clock frequencies, others - not so high.

> (~1997) then I think speed demon is reasonable.

No, that's not what I had in mind.
I was thinking about Models 820 and 900 (1991) and their 1993 successor Model 982.
Around 1994 IBM switched to CMOS microprocessors that initially were to slow to be called Speed Demons. The became speed demons again after switching to (pioneering?) copper interconnects in 1999, but by then contemporary Alpha (21264) was closer to "Quick brainiac" than "Speed demon".

However, after reading Wikipedia article I realized that Model 982 was not clocked quite as high as Alpha 21064 that was announced ~ a year earlier and shipped in volume ~7 months earlier.

> The S/390 CPU had many functional units, but dispatched only one instruction per clock (according to the source
> to which I have a link) while aiming for a high clock rate. That seems speed-demony to me compared to, say,
> Pentium Pro which would issue up to three instructions per clock or the PA-7200 which could dispatch two.
>
> https://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.15.1962&rep=rep1&type=pdf
>
> I think the next gen of IBM mainframe CPUs got wider.
>

I think, IBM mainfraimw offerings remained narrow until z990, which came much later.