
TheHewlett-PackardFOCUSmicroprocessor, launched in 1982, was the first commercial, single chip, fully32-bit microprocessor available on the market. At this time, all32-bit competitors (DEC,IBM,Prime Computer, etc.) used multi-chipbit-slice-CPU designs, while single-chip designs like theMotorola 68000 were a mix of 32 and 16-bit.
Introduced in the Hewlett-PackardHP 9000 Series 500 workstations and servers (originally launched as the HP 9020 and also, unofficially, called HP 9000 Series 600), the single-chip CPU was used alongside the I/O Processor (IOP), Memory Controller (MMU), Clock, and a number of 128-kilobit dynamicRAM devices[1] as the basis of the HP 9000 system architecture.[2] It was a 32-bit implementation of the16-bitHP 3000 computer'sstack architecture,[3] with over 220 instructions (some 32 bits wide, some 16 bits wide), a segmented memory model, and no general purpose programmer-visibleregisters.[4] The design of the FOCUS CPU was richly inspired by the customsilicon on sapphire (SOS) chip design HP used in their HP 3000 series machines.
Because of the high density of HP'sNMOS-III IC process,[5] heat dissipation was a problem. Therefore, the chips were mounted on specialprinted circuit boards, with a ~1 mm copper sheet at its core, called"finstrates".[6][7]
The Focus CPU ismicrocoded with a 9,216 by 38-bit microcodecontrol store. Internal data paths and registers are all 32-bit wide. The Focus CPU has atransistor count of 450,000 FETs.[3][7]
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