Path: utzoo!yunexus!geac!syntron!jtsv16!uunet!auspex!guy
From: guy@auspex.UUCP (Guy Harris)
Newsgroups: comp.arch
Subject: Re: RISC v. CISC
Message-ID: <359@auspex.UUCP>
Date: 31 Oct 88 18:53:41 GMT
Article-I.D.: auspex.359
References: <156@gloom.UUCP> <890@cps3xx.UUCP> <10194@cup.portal.com> <754@wsccs.UUCP>
Reply-To: guy@auspex.UUCP (Guy Harris)
Organization: Auspex Systems, Santa Clara
Lines: 45

>This view is typical of hardware types.  By all means, lets pass the
>buck to the next guy.  So the compiler writer has his(her) share of
>nightmares actually getting something to make the thing compile some
>code.

Umm, I think compiler writers for CISC have their own headaches....

>And then the systems programmer comes along and inserts a few
>more kludges to make the machine purr.

Ditto....

>Now it is the application programmer's turn to s***w things up.
>If my memory serves me correctly, it is much easier to get something
>up and running on a Motorola 68000 than on an Intel 8086 (very nasty,
>those beasty little segments).

Well, perhaps a better comparison there would be between the 68K and the
80386; in that case, you can avoid dealing with the segments.  Given
that comparison, I don't see why it matters to the application program -
or, in a lot of cases, to the *systems* programmer; I've written OS code
that runs on the 68K, SPARC, IBM 370, and 80386 (and that would probably
run on a boatload of other architectures), and I didn't have to do any
extra work to make it work on them all - the C compiler did the work for
me. 

>And miracle of miracles, we learn that over 70% of computing costs are
>software.

A more interesting figure would be "for a given system, how much of the
*design* costs are hardware and how much are software."  I suspect a lot
of the "expensive software and cheap hardware" types are comparing the
*production* costs of the hardware with the *development* costs of the
software, which doesn't yield interesting results - why not compare the
production costs of the hardware and of the software, which would prove
that software is cheap and hardware is expensive....

(Then again, there's the question of whether microcode is software,
hardware, or both....)

>It seems like hardware types should be designing their end of the deal
>to reduce it at the other end.

No, both types should be designing their ends to reduce it at the bottom
line, which is, after all, what really counts.