64-bit CPU

[Tom Legrady]

It was the microcomputer of their larger system, which I think was 
called the 9900. That one worked reasonably well because it had 
sufficient speed and memory to take advantage of a "limitless set of 
register sets". On the other hand, no one remembers it.

Henry Spencer wrote:

>On Thu, 16 Sep 2004, James Knott wrote:
>  
>
>>Was it the old Texas Instruments CPU, used in the TI/99, that didn't 
>>have any on chip registers?  As I recall, the "registers" were in fact, 
>>reserved memory locations.
>>    
>>
>
>The processor was the TI 9900.  The memory wasn't exactly "reserved" --
>the block of 16 "registers" could be anywhere in memory, with a control
>register specifying where it was.  (Possibly it had to be on a 16-word
>boundary; I no longer remember.)
>
>An interesting architecture, and although the initial implementation was
>understandably slow, you could throw more transistors at it to do things
>like caching, and TI was promising to do so.
>
>But the marketing of the computer they designed around it, the 99/4A,
>could be described politely as grossly incompetent.  So they lost a bundle
>on the computer, and I think the chip got dragged down with it. 
>
>                                                          Henry Spencer
>                                                       henry-lqW1N6Cllo0sV2N9l4h3zg at public.gmane.org
>
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