IBM Enterprise Systems Architecture

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IBM Enterprise Systems Architecture is an instruction set architecture introduced by IBM as ESA/370 in 1988. It is based on the IBM System/370-XA architecture.

It extended the dual-address-space mechanism introduced in later IBM System/370 models by adding a new mode in which general-purpose registers 1-15 are each associated with an access register referring to an address space, with instruction operands whose address is computed with a given general-purpose register as a base register will be in the address space referred to by the corresponding address register.

The later ESA/390, introduced in 1990, added a facility to allow device descriptions to be read using channel commands and, in later models, added instructions to perform IEEE 754 floating-point operations and increased the number of floating-point registers from 4 to 16.

Enterprise Systems Architecture is essentially a 32-bit architecture; as with System/360, System/370, and 370-XA, the general-purpose registers are 32 bits long, and the arithmetic instructions support 32-bit arithmetic. Only byte-addressable real memory (Central Storage) and Virtual Storage addressing is limited to 31 bits, as is the case with 370-XA. (IBM reserved the most significant bit to easily support applications expecting 24-bit addressing, as well as to sidestep a problem with extending two instructions to handle 32-bit unsigned addresses.) It maintains problem state backward compatibility dating back to 1964 with the 24-bit-address/32-bit-data (System/360 and System/370) and subsequent 24/31-bit-address/32-bit-data architecture (System/370-XA). However, the I/O subsystem is based on System/370 Extended Architecture (S/370-XA), not on the original S/370 I/O instructions.