Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!husc6!bloom-beacon!apple!baum
From: baum@Apple.COM (Allen J. Baum)
Newsgroups: comp.arch
Subject: Re: ZISC computers
Message-ID: <20743@apple.Apple.COM>
Date: 16 Nov 88 22:12:36 GMT
References: <22115@sgi.SGI.COM>
Reply-To: baum@apple.UUCP (Allen Baum)
Organization: Apple Computer, Inc.
Lines: 20

[]
>In article <22115@sgi.SGI.COM> karsh@trifolium.UUCP (Bruce Karsh) writes:
>Why bother with reduced instruction set computers when a computer
>really doesn't need any instructions per se at all?  At the end of the
>RISC road is the ZISC, Zero Instruction Set Computer.
>The selection of the operation can be determined implicitly from the
>address of the operands.  For example, address zero can be the input to
>an accumulator...
>I'v never seen a computer architecture such as this (ZISC) proposed
>before.  I'd like to know if anybody else has suggested this idea
>before.

Not only is the idea not new, you could have bought one of these beasts about
15 years ago. The GRI-909 (I think that was the number) did essentially that.
You could plug functional units into the bus, and use them, just like the
standard functional units it came with.

--
		  baum@apple.com		(408)974-3385
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