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From: jerry@polygen.uucp (Jerry Shekhel)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.apple2
Subject: Re: HLLs vs. Assembly
Message-ID: <1036@stewart.UUCP>
Date: 8 Apr 91 23:22:23 GMT
References: <15682@smoke.brl.mil> <13275@ucrmath.ucr.edu> <1991Apr4.185435.28753@midway.uchicago.edu> <13347@ucrmath.ucr.edu>
Reply-To: jerry@stewart.UUCP (Jerry Shekhel)
Organization: Polygen Corporation, Waltham, MA
Lines: 35

In article <13347@ucrmath.ucr.edu> rhyde@ucrmath.ucr.edu (randy hyde) writes:
>
>As an aside (which I'm sure will start another flaming thread), I suspect that
>RISC's days are numbered.  Most of the advantages of RISC are being implement-
>ed into CISC, and what CICS will never be able to handle, LIWCs will blow
>both RISC and CISC away on.  I suspect that VCISC computers, once someone
>comes up with a better system bus structure (e.g., optical) will prove
>that RISC is a dead end.
>

I disagree with this, too.  The problem (or blessing) is that people don't
want to write in assembly language, and the hardware which executes all those
complex (CISC) machine instructions is a waste of on-chip real-estate.  Typical
C compilers only utilize a tiny fraction of the instructions available on
a CISC processor, so what's the point?  The upshot of RISC is that these chips
are smaller, they require less power, they are more easily scaled down,
and less hardware is necessary for decoding the instructions, all of these
factors leading to much greater performance.  The typical RISC microprocessor
contains under 100,000 transistor components.  Compare that to the 1 million+
in the 486!  The only disadvantage I see with RISC is that executable programs
compiled for RISC are approximately 30% larger than equivalent programs
compiled for CISC.

>
>*** Randy Hyde
>
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| JERRY J. SHEKHEL  | POLYGEN CORPORATION  | When I was young, I had to walk |
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