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From: cik@l.cc.purdue.edu (Herman Rubin)
Newsgroups: comp.arch
Subject: Re: The 360 was a design landmark (long)
Message-ID: <570@l.cc.purdue.edu>
Date: Tue, 25-Aug-87 07:02:35 EDT
Article-I.D.: l.570
Posted: Tue Aug 25 07:02:35 1987
Date-Received: Thu, 27-Aug-87 04:14:22 EDT
References: <855@tjalk.cs.vu.nl> <2683@hoptoad.uucp> <916@haddock.ISC.COM> <1193@k.gp.cs.cmu.edu>
Organization: Purdue University Statistics Department
Lines: 13
Summary: and they forgot mixed arithmetic completely


A big flaw in the 360-style architecture, which is present in all of its
successors of which I am aware, is that there is no communication between
the integer and floating registers.  I know of no other machines on which
it is as difficult and time consuming to convert between integer and
floating point.  I was also told 22 years ago by an IBM research physicist
that this problem had been pointed out to the design engineers _before_ the
design was fixed; and if one looks at the design at that time, there were
lots of unassigned instructions in the floating point part of the code.
-- 
Herman Rubin, Dept. of Statistics, Purdue Univ., West Lafayette IN47907
Phone: (317)494-6054
hrubin@l.cc.purdue.edu or pur-ee!stat-l!cik or hrubin@purccvm.bitnet