Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!lll-winken!maddog!brooks
From: brooks@maddog.llnl.gov (Eugene D. Brooks III)
Newsgroups: comp.arch
Subject: Re: The VAX Always Uses Fewer Instructions
Keywords: VAX MIPS
Message-ID: <8717@lll-winken.llnl.gov>
Date: 16 Jun 88 21:27:21 GMT
References: <6921@cit-vax.Caltech.Edu> <28200161@urbsdc> <10595@sol.ARPA> <11981@mimsy.UUCP> <914@entropy.ms.washington.edu>
Sender: usenet@lll-winken.llnl.gov
Reply-To: brooks@maddog.UUCP (Eugene D. Brooks III)
Organization: Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory
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In article <914@entropy.ms.washington.edu> mcglk@scott.biostat.washington.edu writes:
>I still haven't seen any good arguments as to why RISC is so much better or
>faster.  I'm kind of fond of the VAX instruction set, and you can do a heck
>of a lot more with one line of its instruction set than you can with five
>or ten lines of RISC code.  Is having eighty or so registers all that much
>faster?
If main memory, and in particular shared memory in a multiprocessor, is
20 to 40 clocks away having eighty or so registers with fully pipelined
memory access is really a whole lot faster.