- published: 17 Jul 2013
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The ROMP or Research (Office Products Division) Micro Processor was a 10 MHz RISC microprocessor designed by IBM in the early 1980s manufactured on a 2 µm process with 45,000 transistors.
ROMP also known in some circles as 032, was first in silicon in 1981 and was originally designed to be used in office products.[citation needed] It was intended as a follow-on to a mid-1970's processor called the "OPD Mini Processor", which was used in text editing systems such as the IBM Office System/6.[citation needed] ROMP originally was shipped in the IBM RT/PC line, announced in 1986, and was later used in an IBM laser printer. For a time the IBM RT/PC was planned to be a personal computer, with ROMP replacing the Intel 8088. However, the software was targeted more towards engineering workstations.
The original ROMP had a 24-bit Reduced Instruction Set Computer (RISC) architecture developed by IBM, but the instruction set was changed to 32 bits a few years into the development.[citation needed] It was originally implemented in a 2 µm NMOS technology. It had sixteen 32-bit general purpose registers and used 32-bit addresses and data paths. The microprocessor was controlled by 118 simple two- and four-byte instructions. Internal processor organization enabled the CPU to execute most register-to-register instructions in a single cycle. An IBM-developed advanced memory management chip provided virtual memory address translation functions and memory control.