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From: melling@cs.psu.edu (Michael D Mellinger)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.next
Subject: Re: RISC vs. CISC -- SPECmarks
Message-ID: <racGk93s1@cs.psu.edu>
Date: 18 Apr 91 03:23:27 GMT
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	<1991Apr10.155032.14786@data.com>
	<1991Apr15.165540.14270@agate.berkeley.edu>
	<1991Apr17.192605.1@sif.claremont.edu>
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In-Reply-To: greg@sif.claremont.edu's message of 18 Apr 91 02:26:05 GMT
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In article <1991Apr17.192605.1@sif.claremont.edu> greg@sif.claremont.edu (Tigger) writes:


   There is one monkey wrench that no one seems to think about.  Gallium
   Arsenide.  CISC chips used to make a great deal of sense when memory was
   so much slower than CPUs.  Instead of wasting clock cycles sitting around
   idle waiting for memory, the CISC chip would perform a complex instruction
   that took multiple clock cycles.  Now that memory has done a fairly good
   job of catching up, RISC makes a great deal of since.  That's where GaAs
   comes in.  It is much faster than silicon, and much more expensive.  The
   price is going to stay high for some time.  Unless you're paying supercomputer
   prices, that means you can't build a whole GaAs computer.  If anything, its
   just going to be the CPU.  Once again, your CPU will be so much faster than
   your memory that CISC is going to be the more productive design.


Is there some reason that memory can't be built out of GaA?  Also,
RISC chips will be the first CPU's made out of GaA because of the low
# of transisters that can currently be put on on a chip made out of
GaA, and RISC chips require fewer CPUs than the monolithic 68040.

Anyway, NeXT needs a near term solution to the price/performane rat
race, and RISC is currently blowing the doors off of CISC.

-Mike