https://thechipletter.substack.com/p/the-first-apple-silicon-the-aquarius-7cb

It appears that Apple between 1986 and 1989 had a project so secret that I only hear about it now. The description of the architecture sounds very familiar :

Scorpius is a tightly-coupled multiprocessor CPU with efficient support for fine-grained parallelism; the architecture was developed to take advantage of the inter-connectivity of single-chip VLSI implementations. Scorpius is intended to be the processing element of a high-performance personal computer system constructed with a minimal number of components. A Scorpius CPU comprises four independent processing units (IPUs) which share access to separate instruction and data caches, a Memory Management Unit, and a Memory/Bus Interface.

IPUs have a small register-oriented instruction set in which all data access to memory Is done by register load and store instructions. (Register and word size is 32 bits.) Each PU has 16 general-purpose registers — a total of 64 for the CPU — and 7 local registers. Local registers include product, remainder, prefix, and various state saving registers. In addition, the four PUs share 8 global registers. Including interrupt, event counter, and global status registers.

SIMD (Single Instruction stream, Multiple Data streams). This mode corresponds to the usual View of parallel processing: each PU executes the same operation on different data streams.

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I thought FC1 was original, hahaha.

OTOH it's interesting to see some sort of architectural convergence.

The Scorpius never delivered, due to complexity and compiler issues.

In the end, I know well that memory latency is what kills general-purpose performance and OOO of some kind becomes necessary. It's interesting though to see how close one can get to OOO-like performance without all the implied overhead.

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Update :