About a year ago Mats Danielson from Stockholm Sweden contacted the CPU Shack about an interesting project, documenting the history of Philips Data Systems, a former powerhouse of European computing. Previously we wrote about the SPC16 micro used in some of these, but Mats has done a complete history.

His book is available for free at Research Gate:  The Rise and Fall of Philips Data Systems. It includes the SPC16 as well as the history of much of Swedish computing.  We’re always happy to help out researchers, be it with data, or just pictures.

Continuing our goal of having test boards available for pretty much every common architecture of the 1970’s we now have a board available for testing Signetics (and later Philips) 8-bit NMOS processor, the 2650, 2650A and 2650B.  Made on a cool black PCB they are a fairly simple system, but are capable of testing some of the special features of the 2650 as well as the added features of the 2650B (if anyone happens to locate one)

These chips did not achieve the wide microcomputer success hoped for (likely due to a lack of second sourcing) they did find their way into many industrial/embedding systems, as well as many arcade/video games (including some made by ATARI).

These boards are in stock, and ship world wide for $94.95.  Head on over to the 2650 page to grab one.

Philips P860 Minicomputer – 1971

In the 1960’s the Dutch Philips Data Systems marketed computers from Honeywell.  By 1970 they decided that simply reselling others machines was not the best value for them, or their customers and set off to design their own series of mini computers.  The first design was the 8-bit P410, which only saw limited success, it was a bit too mini for the early 1970’s when 16-bits or better was the standard. 1970 saw Philips begin work on its successor in Fontenay Aux Roses, near Paris, France, a project known internally as Sagittaire.  It was released in 1971 as the P800 series of mini computers, starting with the P850.   These were a 16-bit design, using 16 16-bit registers.  It shipped with 2k x 16bits of memory and had a cycle time of 3.2 microseconds (~312KHz).  Further versions were released that supported up to 32k x 16bits of memory and faster cycle times.

Philips P851 Chipset

The P800 architecture used the A0 register as the Program Counter and the last register (A15) as a stack pointer.  The design supported up to 64 I/O devices and 64 interrupt levels.  The addressing modes include direct, register, indirect, indexed and indexed indirect types and can operate on bits, bytes (characters), words, and double words.  Since the stack is maintained in memory, the stack pointer can be rewritten, preserving the current stack for easier context switches.  This is of course important as the P800 is designed as a multi-user. multi tasking computer.  The P800 instruction set included 97 instructions, including MULT/DIV, though depending on the model, some of these were simulated (microcoded).  The P800 family found wide use in offices and eventually banks (always the big money market) throughout Europe.  It also proved to be useful in industrial environments, a somewhat underappreciated market for mini-computers at the time.

IRAS – Infrared Astronomical Satellite – Launched 1983 – Based on P851 chipset

In 1979 Philips released the P851, a Single Board Computer (SBC), version of the P800 series.  It included the full 32k words of memory and was an LSI implementation using 5 Philips LSI’s consisting of 4 4-bit ALUs and a control path.  The P851 was used extensively for industrial automation as well as Philip’s own PM4400 computer system.  This system became the basis of the PM4421 development system which supported development and emulation of many processors, including the Intel 8085/86/88, Zilog Z80, 650x, Motorola MC68k, Signetics 2650 and many others.

The P851 LSI design was also used in space missions, perhaps the most famous in the IRAS mission launched in 1983.  This was the first full Infrared mapping mission launched, and in its 10 month mission, mapped almost the entire sky in 4 different IR wavelengths, IRAS Space Discoveries that are even today not yet identified.  The mission was of course limited by the coolant carried to keep the IR detector cold, but the IRAS satellite continues to orbit Earth to this day, with a 16-bit P851 computer still on board.

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TiMedia TM-1300 – Marketing Sample

The roots of TriMedia start in 1987 at Philips with Gerrit Slavenburg (who wrote actual forwards for most of the Datasheets) and Junien Labrousse as the LIFE-1 processor.  At its heart it was a 32-bit VLIW (Very Long Instruction Word) processor. VLIW was a rather new concept in the 1980’s, and really didn’t catch on until the late 90’s.  Intel’s i860 could run in superscalar, or VLIW mode in 1989 but ended up a bit of a flop.  TI made the C6000 lince of the TMS320 DSP which was VLIW based.  By far thos most famous, or perhaps infamous, VLIW implementation were the Transmeta, and the Itanium, both of which proved to be less then successful in the long run (though both ended up finding niche markets).

TriMedia, released their first commercial VLIW product in 1997, the TM1000.  As the name suggests, TriMedia Processors are media focused.  They are based around a general purpose VLIW CPU core, but add audio, video and graphics processing.  THe core is decidedly not designed as a standalone processor.  It implements most CPU functions but not all, for example, it supports only 32-bit floating point math (rather than full 64 or 80 bit).

The TM-1300 was released in 1999 and featured a clock speed of 166MHz @ 2.0V on a 0.25u process.  At 166MHz the TM-1300 consumed about 3.5W, which at the time was relatively low.  It had 32K of Instruction Cache and 16K of Data Cache. As is typical of RISC processors the 1300 had 128 general purpose 32-bit registers. The VLIW instruction length allows five simultaneous operations to be issued every clock cycle. These operations can target any five of the 27 functional units in the processor, including integer and floating-point arithmetic units and SIMD units.

The above picture TM-1300 was a marketing sample handed out to the media during the Consumer Electronics Show for the processors release in 1999.  It is marked with the base specs of the chip as well as CES SAMPLE.  Likely these were pre-production units that didn’t meet spec or failed inspection, remarked for media give-aways.

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