Berkeley RISC project, although somewhat similar concepts had appeared before. The CDC 6600 designed by Seymour Cray in 1964 used a load/store architecture with only two addressing modes (register+register, and register+immediate constant) and 74 operation codes, with the basic clock cycle being 10 times faster than the memory access time. Partly due to the optimized load/store architecture of the CDC 6600, Jack Dongarra says that it can be considered a forerunner of modern RISC systems, although a number of other technical barriers needed to be overcome for the development of a modern RISC system. IBM 801 Michael J. Flynn views the first RISC system as the IBM 801 design, begun in 1975 by John Cocke and completed in 1980. The 801 developed out of an effort to build a 24-bit high-speed processor to use as the basis for a digital telephone switch. To reach their goal of switching 1 million calls per hour (300 per second) they calculated that the CPU required performance on the order of 12 million instructions per second (MIPS), compared to their fastest mainframe machine of the time, the 370/168, which performed at 3.5 MIPS. The design was based on a study of IBM's extensive collection of statistics gathered from their customers. This demonstrated that code in high-performance settings made extensive use of processor registers, and that they often ran out of them. This suggested that additional registers would improve performance. Additionally, they noticed that compilers generally ignored the vast majority of the available instructions, especially orthogonal addressing modes. Instead, they selected the fastest version of any given instruction and then constructed small routines using it. This suggested that the majority of instructions could be removed without affecting the resulting code. These two conclusions worked in concert; removing instructions would allow the instruction opcodes to be shorter, freeing up bits in the instruction word which could then be used to select among a larger set of registers. The telephone switch program was canceled in 1975, but by then the team had demonstrated that the same design would offer significant performance gains running just about any code. In simulations, they showed that a compiler tuned to use registers wherever possible would run code about three times as fast as traditional designs. Somewhat surprisingly, the same code would run about 50% faster even on existing machines due to the improved register use. In practice, their experimental PL/8 compiler,