
Apple Computer: Scorpius Architectural Specification (1988) - kick
https://archive.org/stream/scorpius_architecture#mode/2up
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phs318u
I can't believe the paucity of comments on this article. Surely, this is of
interest to HNers? Am I just the only one that's never heard of this? It
sounds awesome, and confirms my personal bias that an Apple+Sun merger (prior
to the Oracle acquisition) could have been terrific. We all complain about
Apple's slipping quality these days, but they used to (?) have some amazing
engineers.

Edited to add: Does anybody know why this got nixed? Would love to know the
backstory to this.

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NikkiA
1988 would put this squarely in the 'Apple trying to convince Motorola to
develop the 88k' era, most likely this was a backup plan in case they failed
(they did, but by the time the 88k was killed off, they'd managed to get AIM
founded and the 601 was 'in the pipeline')

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allenbaum
There was an AMD 29000 Macintosh. But Apple execs were afraid that would piss
off Motorola too much, and they still needed their parts. So then there was an
88k Macintosh. Execs decided that Moro didn’t have the volume to compete with
Intel, so they put them together with IBM to form AIM and develop PPC (they
considered HPs Precision RISC as well) and went with that until it was clear
even those two couldn’t keep up with Intel- or with Apples direction.

~~~
ACE_Recliner
Was there any serious consideration for an ARM Macintosh derived from Mobius,
or was that strictly meant as an Apple II replacement and then canned in favor
of Newton?

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zzo38computer
You should probably link to this instead:
[https://archive.org/details/scorpius_architecture](https://archive.org/details/scorpius_architecture)

(This way has more compatibility with various computers and software that you
try to view it. Also, for some reason the "FULL TEXT" link does not link
directly to the file, nor does there seem to be a link from there as far as I
can find, but if you change "stream" in the URL to "download" then it will
access the file.)

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drudru11
Thanks for this. I couldn’t really read it on my iPhone otherwise

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karmakaze
Coincidentally (or not?), Power Mac G5's later used the PowerPC 970MP (a dual-
core part) which also carried the code name 'Antares'.

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drudru11
Really interesting architecture. The way they tried to make the processor
units flexibly become SIMD or MIMD is thought provoking. Thanks for sharing
this.

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duskwuff
So... how soon can we expect a HDL implementation of this architecture? :)

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kick
The archive (seemingly erroneously) says this was created in 1989. The text
itself, however, says it was from 10/88.

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DonHopkins
Did it have wicked glowing cooling rods?

[https://farscape.fandom.com/wiki/Cooling_rod](https://farscape.fandom.com/wiki/Cooling_rod)

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person_of_color
What was it?

~~~
Lammy
Late-1980s Apple’s plan for architecting their own RISC CPU. Never made it to
production Macs.

