Quantum Effect Devices
Encyclopedia
MIPS Magnum
The MIPS Magnum was a line of computer workstations designed by MIPS Computer Systems, Inc. and based on the MIPS series of RISC microprocessors. The first Magnum was released in March, 1990, and production of various models continued until 1993 when SGI bought MIPS Technologies. SGI cancelled the...
) instead of concentrating on building microprocessor chips which was MIPS' original mission. Soon after, SGI
Silicon Graphics
Silicon Graphics, Inc. was a manufacturer of high-performance computing solutions, including computer hardware and software, founded in 1981 by Jim Clark...
purchased MIPS. QED was started as a microprocessor design house. IDT
Integrated Device Technology
Integrated Device Technology, Inc. is a publicly traded corporation headquartered in San Jose, California, that designs, manufactures, and markets low-power, high-performance mixed-signal semiconductor solutions for the advanced communications, computing, and consumer industries. The company...
was a major funder and customer for the initial QED design.
The original product plan for QED was to build a MIPS microprocessor for a laptop computer. This was during the ACE
Advanced Computing Environment
The Advanced Computing Environment was defined by an industry consortium in the early 1990s to be the next generation commodity computing platform, the successor to personal computers based on Intel's 32-bit instruction set architecture...
initiative from Microsoft
Microsoft
Microsoft Corporation is an American public multinational corporation headquartered in Redmond, Washington, USA that develops, manufactures, licenses, and supports a wide range of products and services predominantly related to computing through its various product divisions...
to support multiple RISC architectures for their new Windows NT
Windows NT
Windows NT is a family of operating systems produced by Microsoft, the first version of which was released in July 1993. It was a powerful high-level-language-based, processor-independent, multiprocessing, multiuser operating system with features comparable to Unix. It was intended to complement...
operating system. System companies like DeskStation Technology
DeskStation Technology
DeskStation Technology was a manufacturer of RISC-based computer workstations intended to run Windows NT. DeskStation was based in Lenexa, Kansas.-MIPS-based systems:...
and board companies like ShaBLAMM! Computer
ShaBLAMM! Computer
ShaBLAMM! Computer was a startup computer company, founded in the early 1990s, which manufactured MIPS-based upgrade cards for systems running Windows NT.ShaBLAMM!'s main product line was the ShaBLAMM! NiTro-VLB line of upgrade expansion cards....
were building products in the hope that RISC-based personal computer
Personal computer
A personal computer is any general-purpose computer whose size, capabilities, and original sales price make it useful for individuals, and which is intended to be operated directly by an end-user with no intervening computer operator...
s would become mainstream. While that market never materialized, the first product, the R4600
R4600
The R4600, code-named "Orion", is a microprocessor developed by Quantum Effect Design that implemented the MIPS III instruction set architecture . As QED was a design firm that did not fabricate or sell their designs, the R4600 was first licensed to Integrated Device Technology , and later to...
"Orion" microprocessor, proved to be successful in several embedded markets such as networking routers and arcade games. Subsequent projects were designed for companies such as Toshiba
Toshiba
is a multinational electronics and electrical equipment corporation headquartered in Tokyo, Japan. It is a diversified manufacturer and marketer of electrical products, spanning information & communications equipment and systems, Internet-based solutions and services, electronic components and...
and IDT
Integrated Device Technology
Integrated Device Technology, Inc. is a publicly traded corporation headquartered in San Jose, California, that designs, manufactures, and markets low-power, high-performance mixed-signal semiconductor solutions for the advanced communications, computing, and consumer industries. The company...
(R4700), IDT & NKK (R4650), SGI
Silicon Graphics
Silicon Graphics, Inc. was a manufacturer of high-performance computing solutions, including computer hardware and software, founded in 1981 by Jim Clark...
and NEC (R5000
R5000
The R5000 is a microprocessor that implements the MIPS IV instruction set architecture developed by Quantum Effect Design . The project was funded by MIPS Technologies, Inc , also the licensor. MTI then licensed the design to Integrated Device Technology , NEC, NKK, and Toshiba...
).
The PowerPC 603q was a PowerPC
PowerPC
PowerPC is a RISC architecture created by the 1991 Apple–IBM–Motorola alliance, known as AIM...
microprocessor designed for Motorola
Motorola
Motorola, Inc. was an American multinational telecommunications company based in Schaumburg, Illinois, which was eventually divided into two independent public companies, Motorola Mobility and Motorola Solutions on January 4, 2011, after losing $4.3 billion from 2007 to 2009...
, meant for Apple Computer
Apple Computer
Apple Inc. is an American multinational corporation that designs and markets consumer electronics, computer software, and personal computers. The company's best-known hardware products include the Macintosh line of computers, the iPod, the iPhone and the iPad...
's home PC and game machine designs. Neither of these designs were productized, so the PowerPC 603q never reached full production.
Several years later, in an attempt to increase product revenue, the company transformed itself to a product company selling its own line of MIPS microprocessors. At that time, the company changed its name to Quantum Effect Devices. After successful products introductions like the RM5200 and the RM7000, under its own "RISCMark" label, the company had its IPO on 1 February 2000. The initial stock price of $16 jumped to $56.50 on the first day of trading. The company was acquired by PMC-Sierra
PMC-Sierra
PMC-Sierra is a fabless semiconductor company which develops and sells devices into the communications, storage, printing, and embedded computing marketplaces.-Corporate history:...
on October 2000; at the time, Quantum Effect Devices was valued in a stock swap worth $2.3 billion according to one estimate. The company became the Microprocessor Products Division of PMC. The acquisition was done by stock exchange and was valued at $2.3 billion. The team completed the RM9x00 product line while at PMC, but that product line was not successful in the marketplace. Most of the microprocessor core development team derived from QED was laid off as a group by PMC-Sierra in June 2005; the last few were laid off in January 2006.
The company name was attributed to Tom Riordan. He believed that the company would survive to the age when semiconductor geometry dimensions would become so small that quantum effects would dominate circuit behavior.
Devices
The first QED microprocessor was the R4600. The founders of QED, who were previously involved with the R4000R4000
The R4000 is a microprocessor developed by MIPS Computer Systems that implemented the MIPS III instruction set architecture . Officially announced on 1 October 1991, it was one of the first 64-bit microprocessors and the first MIPS III implementation...
, felt that the large device was too complicated and that a simpler implementation would give a better price/performance ratio. For that reason, the R4600 is a re-implementation of the 5-stage Classic RISC pipeline
Classic RISC pipeline
In the history of computer hardware, some early reduced instruction set computer central processing units used a very similar architectural solution, now called a classic RISC pipeline. Those CPUs were: MIPS, SPARC, Motorola 88000, and later DLX....
with large (for the time) cache
Cache
In computer engineering, a cache is a component that transparently stores data so that future requests for that data can be served faster. The data that is stored within a cache might be values that have been computed earlier or duplicates of original values that are stored elsewhere...
s. For a while, this small and low cost device was one of the highest performance microprocessors on the market. While the initial target market of a MIPS laptop computer never materialized, this device found success in several markets. It was the first RISC processor used within a Cisco Systems
Cisco Systems
Cisco Systems, Inc. is an American multinational corporation headquartered in San Jose, California, United States, that designs and sells consumer electronics, networking, voice, and communications technology and services. Cisco has more than 70,000 employees and annual revenue of US$...
network router. It was used in several Atari
Atari
Atari is a corporate and brand name owned by several entities since its inception in 1972. It is currently owned by Atari Interactive, a wholly owned subsidiary of the French publisher Atari, SA . The original Atari, Inc. was founded in 1972 by Nolan Bushnell and Ted Dabney. It was a pioneer in...
/Midway arcade game
Arcade game
An arcade game is a coin-operated entertainment machine, usually installed in public businesses such as restaurants, bars, and amusement arcades. Most arcade games are video games, pinball machines, electro-mechanical games, redemption games, and merchandisers...
s such as the well-known original Mortal Kombat
Mortal Kombat (video game)
Mortal Kombat is a 1992 fighting-game developed and published by Midway for arcades. In 1993, home versions were released by Acclaim Entertainment. Released in the Fall of 1994, the Microsoft Windows 3.1x version was released by Activision Interactive. It is the first title in the Mortal Kombat...
game. The R4600 was licensed by IDT
Integrated Device Technology
Integrated Device Technology, Inc. is a publicly traded corporation headquartered in San Jose, California, that designs, manufactures, and markets low-power, high-performance mixed-signal semiconductor solutions for the advanced communications, computing, and consumer industries. The company...
and Toshiba
Toshiba
is a multinational electronics and electrical equipment corporation headquartered in Tokyo, Japan. It is a diversified manufacturer and marketer of electrical products, spanning information & communications equipment and systems, Internet-based solutions and services, electronic components and...
who manufactured and sold the devices.
The R4700 was targeted at SGI
Silicon Graphics
Silicon Graphics, Inc. was a manufacturer of high-performance computing solutions, including computer hardware and software, founded in 1981 by Jim Clark...
, who wanted a little more floating point
Floating point
In computing, floating point describes a method of representing real numbers in a way that can support a wide range of values. Numbers are, in general, represented approximately to a fixed number of significant digits and scaled using an exponent. The base for the scaling is normally 2, 10 or 16...
performance. The R4700 improved on the repeat rate of floating point multiply instructions. This device was used inside the SGI Indy
SGI Indy
The Indy, code-named "Guinness", is a low-end workstation introduced on 12 July 1993. Developed and manufactured by Silicon Graphics Incorporated , it was the result of their attempt to obtain a share of the low-end computer-aided design market, which was dominated at the time by other workstation...
low-end workstation. The R4700 was licensed by IDT and Toshiba who manufactured and sold the devices.
The R4650 was commissioned by NKK, who desired a cheaper implementation for a video console game
Console game
A console game is a form of interactive multimedia used for entertainment. The game consists of manipulable images generated by a video game console, and displayed on a television or similar audio-video system. The game itself is usually controlled and manipulated using a handheld device connected...
machine. The R4650 achieved a smaller die area by cutting the caches in half, only implementing single precision floating-point. This device was the first QED device that implemented the multiply–accumulate instructions, which enabled software functions such as softmodem
Softmodem
A Softmodem, or software modem, is a modem with minimal hardware capacities, designed to use a host computer's resources to perform most of the tasks performed by dedicated hardware in a traditional modem.A Softmodem is also referred to as a Winmodem because the first commercially available...
. This device was used in the original Microsoft
Microsoft
Microsoft Corporation is an American public multinational corporation headquartered in Redmond, Washington, USA that develops, manufactures, licenses, and supports a wide range of products and services predominantly related to computing through its various product divisions...
WebTV device. The R4650 was licensed by IDT and NKK who manufactured and sold the devices. The R4640 was the same chip but with the system bus restricted to 32-bits instead of 64-bits.
The R5000 was commissioned by SGI. This device doubled the instruction and data caches to 32 KB. It implemented a high-performance, fully pipelined floating point unit with multiply–accumulate capability and a SRT divider. The device had a limited implementation of superscalar
Superscalar
A superscalar CPU architecture implements a form of parallelism called instruction level parallelism within a single processor. It therefore allows faster CPU throughput than would otherwise be possible at a given clock rate...
instruction issue in which one integer instruction and one floating-point instruction could be issued in one cycle. This device was used in the SGI O2
SGI O2
The O2 is an entry-level Unix workstation introduced in 1996 by Silicon Graphics, Inc. to replace their earlier Indy series. Like the Indy, the O2 used a single MIPS microprocessor and was intended to be used mainly for multimedia. Its larger counterpart was the SGI Octane...
and SGI Indy
SGI Indy
The Indy, code-named "Guinness", is a low-end workstation introduced on 12 July 1993. Developed and manufactured by Silicon Graphics Incorporated , it was the result of their attempt to obtain a share of the low-end computer-aided design market, which was dominated at the time by other workstation...
low-end workstations. The design was owned by SGI, which licensed the design to IDT and NEC
NEC
, a Japanese multinational IT company, has its headquarters in Minato, Tokyo, Japan. NEC, part of the Sumitomo Group, provides information technology and network solutions to business enterprises, communications services providers and government....
and eventually to Toshiba.
The PowerPC 603q was commissioned by Motorola
Motorola
Motorola, Inc. was an American multinational telecommunications company based in Schaumburg, Illinois, which was eventually divided into two independent public companies, Motorola Mobility and Motorola Solutions on January 4, 2011, after losing $4.3 billion from 2007 to 2009...
and the target market was Apple Computer
Apple Computer
Apple Inc. is an American multinational corporation that designs and markets consumer electronics, computer software, and personal computers. The company's best-known hardware products include the Macintosh line of computers, the iPod, the iPhone and the iPad...
's low-cost accounts including a home computer for students and a home video console game named Pippen. The 603q was basically the R4600 pipeline re-targeted for the PowerPC
PowerPC
PowerPC is a RISC architecture created by the 1991 Apple–IBM–Motorola alliance, known as AIM...
instruction set. Since the PowerPC 603 was then the most power-efficient chip from the AIM alliance
AIM alliance
The AIM alliance was an alliance formed on October 2, 1991, between Apple Inc. , IBM, and Motorola to create a new computing standard based on the PowerPC architecture. The stated goal of the alliance was to challenge the dominant Wintel computing platform with a new computer design and a...
, the name of this device was chosen to reflect its low-cost and low-power characteristics. Once those Apple projects were cancelled, Motorola stopped the development of the 603q even though QED had received first silicon samples and they were functional.
The RM52XX series was the first product line sold directly by QED. The first of the series was a cost-reduced version of the R5000 with smaller caches and a different pin-out. The earlier RM52X0 devices had only 16 KB caches while the later RM52X1 devices had 32 KB caches. The RM523X devices had 32-bit system buses while RM526X had 64-bit system buses. This product line was very successful in the laser printer market, winning many accounts at printer companies such as Hewlett-Packard
Hewlett-Packard
Hewlett-Packard Company or HP is an American multinational information technology corporation headquartered in Palo Alto, California, USA that provides products, technologies, softwares, solutions and services to consumers, small- and medium-sized businesses and large enterprises, including...
, Lexmark
Lexmark
Lexmark International, Inc. is an American corporation which develops and manufactures printing and imaging products, including laser and inkjet printers, multifunction products, printing supplies, and services for business and individual consumers...
, Ricoh
Ricoh
or Ricoh, is a Japanese company that was established in 1936 on February 6th, as , a company in the RIKEN zaibatsu. Its headquarters is located in Ricoh Building in Chūō, Tokyo....
, Samsung
Samsung
The Samsung Group is a South Korean multinational conglomerate corporation headquartered in Samsung Town, Seoul, South Korea...
.
The RM70XX series was the second product line sold directly by QED. It implemented a large 256 KB on-chip level 2 cache. The RM7000 was one of the first microprocessors to do so, especially within the embedded microprocessor market segment. It also implemented symmetric superscalar instruction issue with two integer execution units. The RM7061 device was a pin-compatible upgrade for the RM526X series. This product line was a very successful follow-on to the RM52XX products.
The RM9x00 family was the first SOC
System-on-a-chip
A system on a chip or system on chip is an integrated circuit that integrates all components of a computer or other electronic system into a single chip. It may contain digital, analog, mixed-signal, and often radio-frequency functions—all on a single chip substrate...
implemented by QED. The Apollo microprocessor core that was part of the RM9x00 had its pipeline lengthened to 7 stages to enable higher operating frequencies. Dynamic branch prediction was added to ameliorate the longer branch latencies. Within the RM9x00, two Apollo cores were used to implement a dual-core device
Multi-core (computing)
A multi-core processor is a single computing component with two or more independent actual processors , which are the units that read and execute program instructions...
. These processor cores successfully achieved their operating frequency target of 1 GHz. The SOC system interconnect was an in-house design with centralized storage for the transactions flowing through the SOC. Peripherals included a DDR memory controller
Memory controller
The memory controller is a digital circuit which manages the flow of data going to and from the main memory. It can be a separate chip or integrated into another chip, such as on the die of a microprocessor...
, a SysAD bus controller, a boot bus controller, a DMA
Direct memory access
Direct memory access is a feature of modern computers that allows certain hardware subsystems within the computer to access system memory independently of the central processing unit ....
controller and a Hypertransport
HyperTransport
HyperTransport , formerly known as Lightning Data Transport , is a technology for interconnection of computer processors. It is a bidirectional serial/parallel high-bandwidth, low-latency point-to-point link that was introduced on April 2, 2001...
controller. A second generation device added a Gigabit ethernet
Gigabit Ethernet
Gigabit Ethernet is a term describing various technologies for transmitting Ethernet frames at a rate of a gigabit per second , as defined by the IEEE 802.3-2008 standard. It came into use beginning in 1999, gradually supplanting Fast Ethernet in wired local networks where it performed...
controller, a PCI
Peripheral Component Interconnect
Conventional PCI is a computer bus for attaching hardware devices in a computer...
controller and cache coherency. This product family was not successful due to being late to the market. The company was financially conservative during the time leading up to and after the company's initial public offering and would not fully staff the SOC project. One of the reasons for selling the company to PMC-Sierra was to fund these SOC projects. By that time, competitors like SiByte had already entered the market with equivalent devices.