The design concentrates on fast instruction decoding, indexed array access, and procedure calls.
The project was ended in March 1994[1] because the Hobbit failed to achieve commercially viable sales.
The C Machine Project at Bell Labs had been underway since 1975 to develop computer architectures to run C programming language programs efficiently, aiming for a design that would offer an order of magnitude performance improvement over commercially available computers while remaining competitive in terms of cost.
The performance objectives were largely met by the fabricated processor, running at 16 MHz and delivering a Dhrystone benchmark score over 13 times greater than the VAX-11/750, achieving approximately 7.7 VAX MIPS.
Meanwhile, the 92020M and 92020MX processors were intended for use with the new support chips, also employing a multiplexed address and data bus for reduced pin count, and offering lower levels of performance, with the 92020M also utilizing a 6 KB cache and achieving similar performance to the original 92010.
"[9] Apple rejected the Hobbit and adopted the ARM610 for the Newton,[10] also partnering with Acorn Computers and VLSI Technology to form Advanced RISC Machines (ARM) in late 1990 with a $2.5 million investment.
[9] The Active Book Company (founded by Hermann Hauser, who also founded Acorn Computers), which had been using an ARM in its Active Book personal digital assistant (PDA),[11] was later purchased by AT&T and was subsumed by AT&T's Eo subsidiary,[12] which produced an early PDA, the EO Personal Communicator, running PenPoint OS from the GO Corporation.
By seeking to limit the data processing operations to a single clock cycle, a simpler control mechanism can be employed to dispatch instructions, making it easier to tune the instruction pipelines,[18] and add superscalar support.
The compiler writes code to create activation records using the underlying processor's load-store design.
They decided that all future processors would thus move to a load-store design, and built Inferno to reflect this.