PA-RISC

PA-RISC (Precision Architecture RISC) also known as HPPA (Hewlett Packard Precision Architecture) is a RISC CPU architecture created by Hewlett Packard in 1985. Its most common use was on the HP 9000 line of servers and workstations. Officially it was superseded by the Itanium architecture. The last HP workstation using a PA-RISC CPU was the HP 9000 c8000 and the last CPU was the PA-8900 "Shortfin" released in 2005.

Features

• Originally 32-bit for PA-RISC 1.0, extended to 64-bit in version 2.0
• Thirty-two general purpose integer registers
• Floating point registers, thirty-two for PA-RISC 2.0 and sixteen for PA-RISC 1.0
• Big-endian only in PA-RISC 1.0, optionally bi-endian for versions ≥1.1
• SIMD extensions (Multimedia Acceleration eXtensions—MAX), added in PA-RISC 2.0

Compiler support

• GCC, running on Linux and HP-UX, along with glibc (GNU C Standard Library) support^[1]
• HP C/aC++ compiler, included with HP-UX

OS support

• HP-UX, HP's commercial proprietary UNIX variant that supported PA-RISC until version 11.31
• NetBSD has a Tier 2 port available
• Linux, from the PA-RISC/Linux project, mainline support merged in version 2.6

Emulator support

• QEMU, can emulate the HP B160L (PA-7100LC, 32-bit, PA1.1) and the HP C3700 workstations (PA-8700, 64-bit, PA2.0) ^[2]

References

External links

• PA-RISC 2.0 Architecture Archive of official HP documentation on the PA-RISC 2.0 architecture
• HP References & Manuals Archive of HP documentation, including PA-RISC
• OpenPA PA-RISC documentation and information archive
• http://ftp.parisc-linux.org/docs/arch/ More documentation on the ABI, the firmware enviroment and the ISA itself
• PA-RISC 2.0 Firmware Architecture Reference Specification Version 0.36
• 64-Bit Runtime Architecture for PA-RISC 2.0 PA-RISC 2.0 ABI
• NetBSD/hppa
• Linux on PA-RISC
• QEMU for PA-RISC overview General instructions on how to use QEMU's PA-RISC emulation, not restricted to just running Linux
• QEMU PA-RISC Emulation More on QEMU for this architecture
• Hewlett Packard PA-8800 RISC Overview of the PA-8800 processor