Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!ns-mx!pyrite.cs.uiowa.edu From: jones@pyrite.cs.uiowa.edu (Douglas W. Jones,201H MLH,3193350740,3193382879) Newsgroups: comp.arch Subject: Re: registerless architecture Message-ID: <3168@ns-mx.uiowa.edu> Date: 12 Nov 90 18:02:50 GMT References: <1990Nov12.145410.29035@cs.cmu.edu> Sender: news@ns-mx.uiowa.edu Lines: 16 From article <1990Nov12.145410.29035@cs.cmu.edu>, by spot@WOOZLE.GRAPHICS.CS.CMU.EDU (Scott Draves): > > Has anyone every thought about or done a registerless architecture? My Ultimate RISK (Computer Architecture News, 1988) is a memory-to-memory architecture with no registers in the instruction execution unit other than the PC. It has no arithmetic unit in the IEU either, which is why I call it an IEU instead of a CPU. The registers and arithmetic unit(s) are out on the memory bus. It was proposed as a purely pedagogical exercise, but it can be pipelined to death, and with appropriate ALU(s) out on the bus, it can be quite powerful. I gather a few people have built or are building machines based on my design, but I haven't heard much from them. Doug Jones jones@herky.cs.uiowa.edu