AT&T’s CRISP Hobbits - Supplemental

More on the AT&T stack-oriented processor design

More background on the Hobbit microprocessor following on from the post AT&T’s CRISP Hobbit.

Fax From The Beach

When writing this post it was hard to avoid getting sucked into a rabbit hole and writing all about the EO Personal Communicator! I managed to mostly avoid doing so. I couldn’t resist this though:

Yes that’s Tom Selleck in an ad directed by David Fincher, of Fight Club fame, using an EO Personal Communicator. Here is the full transcript:

Have you ever borrowed a book from thousands of miles away, driven cross the country without stopping for directions or send someone a fax from the beach? You will. And the company that'll bring it to you? AT&T.

If it shows one thing there was no shortage of (fairly accurate vision) of what the future would look like in 1993.

Hat-tip to Ernie Smith with his great article "Fax on the beach: The story of the audacious, visionary, totally calamitous iPad of the '90s" at Input magazine.

I definitely don’t agree with the conclusion from Go cofounder Jerry Kaplan though.

We could have HAD THE iPHONE 10 years earlier, AT LEAST

It just wasn't possible to build something with the iPhone’s performance, user interface and battery life in 1997.

Now let’s focus on the Hobbit!

Was the Hobbit a RISC Processor?

In the comments on The RISC Wars Part 1 : The Cambrian Explosion, I was challenged about the omission of the Hobbit from the list of 1980s RISC processors. I replied that I didn’t think it was but that I was open to persuasion otherwise.

The CRISP design that preceded the Hobbit actually has’Reduced Instruction Set’ in its name! Dave Ditzel, one of the CRISP designers, has described CRISP as a RISC design.

So were CRISP and the Hobbit RISC processors?

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