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From: irf@kuling.UUCP (Bo Thide)
Newsgroups: comp.arch,comp.sys.hp
Subject: RISC vs. CISC vs. RCC
Message-ID: <891@kuling.UUCP>
Date: 6 Nov 88 00:07:12 GMT
Sender: news@kuling.UUCP
Reply-To: irf@kuling.UUCP (Bo Thide)
Organization: Dept. of Computer Systems, Uppsala University, Sweden
Lines: 27


 I just came across a report written June this year by the Gartner Group.
It says:

"We believe that future computer architectures will lie somewhere in between
current RISC and CISC implementations... To design an architecture, a vendor
must analyze years of instruction traces for existing applications to determine
the impact of each instruction in the architecture on real applications.
Then for each instruction, the vendor must weigh the costs of including that
instruction in the architecture or omitting it.  The actual financial cost
of adding the instruction, as well as the performance cost, must be considered.
Hewlett-Packard used this method in designing its Precision Architecture,
and it may account for why HP-PA has demonstrated the best architecture
that we have seen.  It may also be why HP-PA has 125 instructions instead of
only 50.  HP-PA may be the first reduced complexity computer."

Who else has done the same thing and come up with an RCC (Reduced Complexity
Computer)?  What if "existing applications" change -  would that mean that
future RCCs/RISCs might have a different instruction set than HP-PA?


   ^   Bo Thide'--------------------------------------------------------------
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