Apollo PRISM

PRISM (Parallel Reduced Instruction Set Multiprocessor) was Apollo Computer's high-performance CPU used in their DN10000 series workstations. It was for some time the fastest microprocessor available, a high fraction of a Cray-1 in a workstation. Hewlett Packard purchased Apollo in 1989, ending development of PRISM, although some of PRISM's ideas were later used in HP's own HP-PA Reduced instruction set computer (RISC) and Itanium processors.

PRISM was based on what would be known today as a VLIW-design, while most efforts of the era, 1988, were based on a more "pure" RISC approach. In early RISC designs, the core processor was simplified as much as possible in order to allow more of the chip's real-estate to be used for registers and simplifying the addition of instruction pipelines for improved performance.

The compilers used with the systems were expected to dedicate more time during compilation to making effective use of the registers and cleaning the instruction stream. By doing instruction scheduling in the compiler, this design avoided the problems and complexity of dynamic instruction scheduling (where instructions for multiple functional units must be selected carefully in order to avoid interdependencies between intermediate values) encountered in superscalar designs such as Digital Equipment Corporation's Alpha.

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