Volume II closes its narrative the way Volume I does: crediting the research programs that paid for the architecture’s development at UC Berkeley.
- Par Lab — Microsoft (Award #024263) and Intel (Award #024894) with U.C. Discovery matching (Award #DIG07-10227); affiliates Nokia, NVIDIA, Oracle, Samsung.
- Project Isis — DoE Award DE-SC0003624.
- ASPIRE Lab — DARPA PERFECT (HR0011-12-2-0016) and POEM (HR0011-11-C-0100) programs; C-FAR, a Semiconductor Research Corporation STARnet center; industrial sponsor Intel with affiliates Google, Huawei, Nokia, NVIDIA, Oracle, Samsung.
With the customary disclaimer: none of it implies US-government endorsement.
Hardware Designer Notes
The funding acknowledgments explain a recurring pattern you’ve now seen across twenty chapters: whenever the spec faced a choice between mandating hardware and permitting a software fallback, it permitted the fallback. Research-lab economics became an ISA design principle.
Minimal Linux-boot hart MUST
- Nothing — no architectural content in this chapter
MAY simplify / trap-and-emulate
- Take the origin story as design context: the privileged spec’s trap-and-emulate friendliness, WARL escape hatches, and make-everything-optional philosophy all trace back to research groups needing to build real chips on academic budgets
Check yourself — history
1.Where did the privileged architecture's development originate, and under what kind of funding?
1 questions