PA-RISC
More info
- Creator
- Hewlett-Packard
- Released
- 1986
- Type
- Processor architecture (RISC)
- Successor
- Itanium
HP's own RISC architecture from 1986 that powered the HP 9000 machines for two decades before Itanium took over.
PA-RISC (Precision Architecture RISC) was Hewlett-Packard's answer to the 1980s RISC wave. It debuted in 1986 and became the engine inside HP 9000 servers and workstations running HP-UX. The design was lean: few instructions, many registers, and high clock speeds for its day.
Rather than keep developing the architecture alone, HP teamed up with Intel on Itanium, which was to inherit the role. The last PA-RISC chip, the PA-8900, arrived in 2005 and HP-UX migrated to Itanium. That the successor turned into a commercial belly-flop is the twist in the tale — PA-RISC worked perfectly well.