dtj v02-02 1990

This document is the Spring 1990 issue (Volume 2, Number 2) of the Digital Technical Journal, published by Digital Equipment Corporation.

Its primary focus is the VAX 6000 Model 400 System, a midrange multiprocessor designed for numerically intensive applications. The issue details the innovations and developments behind this system, including:

• The VAXvector 6000 Model 400 processor, capable of peak speeds up to 90 MFLOPS for single-precision calculations, and optimization techniques like instruction overlapping, out-of-order execution, and chaining.
• The VAX 6000 Model 400 Scalar Processor Module, which significantly boosted performance over its predecessor.
• An overview of the custom chip set (CPU, floating point accelerator, vector/cache controller, system support, and clock chips) engineered for a 28-nanosecond cycle time.
• Advances in physical technology, such as tape-automated bonding and semicustomized ceramic single-chip package designs, and testability.
• The extensive functional design verification and system test and qualification processes used to ensure reliability and performance. The Model 400 achieved single-processor performance of 7 times that of a VAX-11/780 system, and up to 36 times for six-processor systems.

Additionally, the journal covers a secondary theme:

• The development of the DECstation 3100, a fast, competitively priced, RISC-based ULTRIX workstation.
• Compiler optimization techniques in RISC systems, related to the MIPS RISC chip set incorporated in the DECstation 3100.

In essence, the document provides in-depth technical articles on the architecture, hardware, and performance of Digital's VAX 6000 Model 400 system, alongside insights into their workstation and RISC compiler technologies from that era.