Advanced RISC Computing (ARC) Specification for the Advanced Computing Environment (ACE)
The Advanced Computing Environment (ACE) consortium was set up in
the early 1990's by a number of companies to try and make a commodity
computing platform based on MIPS processors as an alternative
to the IBM-compatible
Personal Computer based on Intel or Intel-compatible processors.
The ACE consortium produced the Advanced
RISC Computing (ARC) Specification (393K bytes, PDF), to specify
hardware and firmware standards for this new computing platform.
Unfortunately, the ARC platform failed to gain a critical mass of
interest, and the consortium
fell apart. The effort wasn't completely wasted; Microsoft was a member of the
consortium and adopted much of the ARC specification for Windows
NT, though Microsoft discontinued support for MIPS processors with
the release of Windows NT version 4.
The NetBSD Project supports these systems in NetBSD/arc.
We make version 1.2 of the ARC specification
(393K bytes, PDF) available with MIPS's permission, provided that
we make clear that this is a historical document which the modern,
post-SGI MIPS does in
no way support.
(Contact us)
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