iAPX 432 hardware fault-handling mechanisms

Abstract

The architecture of the Intel iAPX 432 system has two major innovative characteristics: hardware support for object-oriented programming, and fault-handling mechanisms implemented on the chip. A previous paper has dealt with the former characteristic; the present paper describes the latter class of features, which allow massive redundancy to be implemented with a small number of chips. Another prominent characteristic of the iAPX 432 is the ability to automatically reconfigure itself using only hardware components; in this way the system-down periods can be much reduced and the traffic of messages reporting the occurrence of faults not recoverable by the hardware is considerably lessened.