RS/6000 Architecture Overview

The following information was gleamed from the "All About AIX Version 4.1" manual (ABOUT4P1 TERS3820) available from the ABOUT4_1 PACKAGE on MKTTOOLS, which doesn't exist anymore. Now it's available from the public, Toronto, Online Pubs web page as a 300-page book in PostScript level 2 format.

RISC systems first came out in June, 1990.

There are 3 different RISC architectures, POWER, POWER2, and PowerPC. The PowerPC family of processors,announced in September, 1993, were jointly developed by IBM, Motorola, and Apple.

POWER:  Used in all RISC systems prior to 10/93.
        Has two implementations, RS1 & RSC.
        RS1 is the original 7-9 chip implementation.
            aka RIOS1, RS.9, and Power Classic.
            320, 320H, 340, 340H, 350, 355, 360, 365, 36T, 370, 375, 37T,
            520, 520H, 530, 530H, 540, 550, 550L, 560, 570, 580,
            730, 740, 741, 930, 950, 950E, 970, 970B, 980B, R10
        RSC stands for RISC Single Chip.
            Used in low-end & diskless systems.
            M20, 220, 230.

POWER2:  Adds 11 instructions.
         Introduced in September, 1993.
         aka POWERX, RIOS2, RS2.
         380, 390, 390H (aka 39H), 3AT, 3BT, 3CT, 580H (aka 58H), 
         590, 590H (aka 59H), 591, 990, R20, R24.

POWER2 Super Chip (P2SC):  Integrates 8-chip POWER2 technology into a single chip.


PowerPC-601:  Acts as a bridge between POWER & PowerPC.
              Replaces low-end RSC.
              Includes most of the POWER and PowerPC instructions.
              G30, J30, R30, N40, 40P, 250, 41T, 41W, C10 

PowerPC-603:  Low-power chip for portable computers (notebooks, palmtops).
              Nap mode and doze mode.
              Disk spins slower or stops when no activity.
              Only PowerPC chip which is not multi-processor enabled.

PowerPC-604:  Mid-range computers.
              Multi-processor enabled.


IBM's RS/6000 Scalable POWERparallel (SP) Systems take from 1 to 512
POWER2, P2SC, or PowerPC Symmetric multiprocessor (SMP) processors,
and connects them all together, each node running AIX.



X-Stations:

     Processor                     MHz   Storage(MB)   Xmark93
120  ???
130  ???
140  LSI R33020 CMOS                33    4-68           1.5 
150  Motorola 64-bit RISC 88110     40    6-70           3.2
160  PowerPC 603                    66    8-96           5

See my RS/6000 uniprocessor reference or multiprocessor reference for my own comparison chart of different RS/6000 models.