Path: utzoo!mnetor!uunet!lll-winken!lll-lcc!pyramid!prls!mips!mash
From: mash@mips.COM (John Mashey)
Newsgroups: comp.arch
Subject: Re: Longer quote, RPM-40 performance
Message-ID: <1732@winchester.mips.COM>
Date: 1 Mar 88 09:47:52 GMT
References: <9679@steinmetz.steinmetz.UUCP> <9689@steinmetz.steinmetz.UUCP> <1695@winchester.mips.COM> <9721@steinmetz.steinmetz.UUCP>
Reply-To: mash@winchester.UUCP (John Mashey)
Organization: MIPS Computer Systems, Sunnyvale, CA
Lines: 34
Keywords: DAIS, 14 MIPS, General Electric

In article <9721@steinmetz.steinmetz.UUCP> davidsen@crdos1.UUCP (bill davidsen) writes:
...
>Nope. It runs a general purpose instruction set, it has lots of power,
>and RISC machines are not too bad as targets for UNIX ports. Looks like
>the speed would be 2-6 times the Sun (25MHz) machines, depending on
>implementation.
As noted elsewhere, the design as presented has 2 obvious problems
for UNIX: people would happily hear why they are not so:
	a) The MMU
	b) The use of SRAM as THE memory, not cache, and the limits
	thereof. I'd assume that with a major bunch of external logic,
	and some performance hits, you can probably work around these, but why?
	c) Can we get numbers to back up the 2-6?
	d) Does it have software? (Note: 2-6X a Sun-3/260 is competitive,
	or at least the 4-6 part is, if it's delivered
		in a system
		with a solid UNIX
		with good compilers, at least C, FORTRAN, ADA
		within the next 6 months)
>
>I don't think it's a microcontroller in the usual sense, with a lack of
>general instructions and registers, and limited word size. There was NO
>smiley face on my posting, and not on this one either.

Microcontrollers (to me) are VLSI micros tuned in different directions
from more general-purpose micros.  I'd happily hear a different term,
like microprocessor-tuned-for-embedded-systems, or whatever.
Many of the general-purpose RISC micros are tuned very differently,
i.e., caches, MMUs geared to demand-paging, high-level language
orientation, etc.
-- 
-john mashey	DISCLAIMER: <generic disclaimer, I speak for me only, etc>
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