The Pascal programming language had to be re-written for every new computer being acquired, so Ammann proposed writing the system one time to a virtual architecture.
The successful academic implementation of Pascal was the UCSD p-System developed by Kenneth Bowles, a professor at UCSD, who began the project of developing a universal Pascal programming environment using the P-machine architecture for the multitude of different computing platforms in use at that time.
A myriad of timing and performance problems plagued the machine; McCormack proposed a redesign of the processor, which would have a microsequencer based on programmable logic.
When McCormack left NCR to start Volition Systems he continued his work on the processor as a contractor.
Two bits per clock selected one of four cycle times for each instruction: 130, 150, or 175 nanoseconds, which generated with a delay line.
Integer addition took only a single instruction cycle; since one operand was always in the register file, only one fetch from stack memory was needed.
The end result was a 9"x11" board for the CPU that ran UCSD p-System faster than anything else, by a wide margin.
It also ran faster than the Niklaus Wirth Lilith machine but lacked the bit-mapped graphics capabilities, and around the same speed as a VAX-11/750 running native code.