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From: lindsay@MATHOM.GANDALF.CS.CMU.EDU (Donald Lindsay)
Newsgroups: comp.arch
Subject: 80-20
Message-ID: <6927@pt.cs.cmu.edu>
Date: 10 Nov 89 21:12:59 GMT
Organization: Carnegie-Mellon University, CS/RI
Lines: 16


From the press:

"...Digital's engineers isolated the core VAX instruction set,
including 80% of the most used opcodes and optimized it to the VAX
9000 gate structure.  The conversion didn't involve reducing - or
RISCing - the instruction set but more accurately hardwiring it into
a single-cycle instruction set.  ... The other 20% of complex
instructions execute with microcode as always..."


If DEC would document exactly what's in that 80%, then VAX compiler
writers could FINALLY settle the subject of choosing between
different instruction sequences.
-- 
Don		D.C.Lindsay 	Carnegie Mellon Computer Science