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From: BillW@SU-SCORE.ARPA (William Chops Westfield)
Newsgroups: net.micro
Subject: Re: ANOTHER 32-BIT MACHINE???
Message-ID: <9266@brl-tgr.ARPA>
Date: Fri, 15-Mar-85 23:28:48 EST
Article-I.D.: brl-tgr.9266
Posted: Fri Mar 15 23:28:48 1985
Date-Received: Sun, 17-Mar-85 22:06:00 EST
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Hmm.  there are two questions.

Is there room for another general purpose 32bit microprocessor?

	One would hope not, but Im afraid that there is.  Everyone
	is out to copy the PDP11 and or VAX, which is too bad since
	the 11 doesn't scale well to larger memory or register files,
	and the vax doesn't have all that wonderful an instruction
	set anyway (an less than successful 11 copy there also).
	The state of software (even for existing 16 bit cpus), is
	in such a sorry state that having more processors wont make
	it much worse.  What with the newer compiler strategies, it
	is relatively easy to re-write your back end to produce bad
	code for any number of different processors...

Is there room for another 32bit microprocessor?

	Sure, there are a lot of things that can be done that would
	be useful, or at least interesting.  I don't think that any
	of the current 32 bit chips does a very good job.  After all,
	they are mostly 16bit machines with wider busses an ALUs.
	Id like to see a comercially available 32 bit chip with
	a RISC instruction set, or with user writeable microcode,
	or one with taged operands (lisp machine on a chip?)

Semiwhimsically
Bill Westfield