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PA-RISC

Instruction set architecture by Hewlett-Packard

Precision Architecture RISC (PA-RISC) or Hewlett Packard Precision Architecture (HP/PA or HPPA), is a general purpose computer instruction set architecture (ISA) developed by Hewlett-Packard from the 1980s until the 2000s. The architecture was introduced on 26 February 1986, when the HP 3000 Series 930 and HP 9000 Model 840 computers were launched featuring the first implementation, the TS1.

HP stopped selling PA-RISC-based HP 9000 systems at the end of 2008 but supported servers running PA-RISC chips until 2013. PA-RISC was succeeded by the Itanium (originally IA-64) ISA, jointly developed by HP and Intel. In the late 1980s, HP was building four series of computers, all based on CISC CPUs. One line was the IBM PC compatible Intel i286-based HP Vectra series, started in 1986. All others were non-Intel systems. One of them was the HP 9000 Series 300 of Motorola 68000 series based workstations, another HP 9000 Series 200 line of technical workstations based on a custom silicon on sapphire (SOS) chip design, the SOS based 16-bit HP 3000 classic series, and finally the HP 9000 Series 500 minicomputers, based on their own (16- and 32-bit) FOCUS microprocessor. The Precision Architecture is the result of what was known inside Hewlett-Packard as the Spectrum program. HP planned to use Spectrum to move all of their non-PC compatible machines to a single RISC CPU family.

1 copy in circulation

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