Information AboutNord-100 |
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The NORD-100 was originally named the NORD-10/M (''M'' for ''Micro'') as a bitsliced OEM processor. The board was laid out and finished and tested when they realized that the CPU was far faster than the NORD-10/S. The result was that all the marketing material for the new NORD-10/M was discarded, the board was rechristened the NORD-100, and extensively advertised as the successor of the NORD-10 line. Later, in an effort to internationalize their line, the machine was renamed ND-100. PERFORMANCE CPU The ND-100 line used a custom processor, and like the PDP-11 line, the CPU decided the name of the computer.
The ND-100 line was machine-instruction compatible with the Nord-10 line, except for some "extended instructions", all in supervisor mode, mostly used by the operating system. Like most processors of its time, the native bit grouping was Octal , despite the 16-bit word length. The ND-100 series had a Microcoded central processing unit, with downloadable microcode, and was considered a CISC processor. ND-100 The ND-100 was implemented using MSI logic and bitslice processors. The ND-100 was frequently sold together with a memory management card, the MMS. The combined power use of these boards was 90 watts. These boards would usually occupy slots 2 and 3, for the CPU and MMS, respectively. Slot 1 was reserved for the Tracer, a hardware debugger system. ND-100/CE The CE stood for Commercial Extended. The processor was upgraded by replacing the microcode PROM. It added instruction for decimal arithmetic and conversion, stack instructions, segment-change instructions used by the OS, a block move, test-and-set, and a read-without-cache instruction. ND-110 The ND-110 was an incremental improvement over the ND-100. The ND-110 combined the Memory Management System and CPU, previously separate cards, on one board. The single CPU/MMS board was plugged into the memory management board slot, usually numbered 3. The power consumption was reduced from 90 watts to 60. The ND-110 made extensive use of PALs and gate arrays - with "semi-custom" VLSI chips. The ND-110 had three gate arrays:
In addition to the macro-instruction cache memory also found in the ND-100, the ND-110 had a unique implementation of cache memory on the micro-instruction level. The step known as mapping in the ND-100 was then avoided because the first micro-instruction word of a macro-instruction was written into the control store cache. Unlike the ND-100 CPU, it handled synchronous interrupts as traps, similar to how it was handled by the ND-500. The control store consisted of 4K x 4 bit 40ns SRAM chips. This meant that the control store was writable. It was loaded at power up and Master Clear from two 32Kx8 bit EPROMs. The CPU clock and the bus arbitration network were implemented uding 15ns PALs. The main oscillator was a 39.3216MHz crystal oscillator. ND-110/CX This was the ND-110 with the CX microcode PROM. The added instructions were the same as the /CE. ND-120/CX The ND-120 CPU was a complete reimplementation on an LSI chip, and was originally intended to be sold as the ''ND-1000'', to reflect the technology change, which paralleled the change from the ND-500 series to the ND-5000 . SEE ALSO |
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