Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!mcvax!hp4nl!eutrc3!rcbaps
From: rcbaps@eutrc3.UUCP (Pieter Schoenmakers)
Newsgroups: comp.arch
Subject: Re: Not-so RISCy
Summary: UNIX on a machine without 16 bit instructions
Keywords: risc
Message-ID: <483@eutrc3.UUCP>
Date: 16 Feb 89 09:12:06 GMT
References: <732@wpi.WPI.EDU> <13259@winchester.mips.COM>
Reply-To: rcbaps@eutrc3.UUCP (Pieter Schoenmakers)
Organization: Eindhoven University of Technology, The Netherlands
Lines: 15

In article <13259@winchester.mips.COM> mash@mips.COM (John Mashey) writes:
>[...] I wouldn't put UNIX on a machine
>that didn't have 16-bit operations, even though many user-level statistics
>wouldn't justify their presence. [...]

Just for your information: it has been done: the Acorn Archimedes R140,
which is to be released officially this month, runs Unix BSD on the ARM,
a load/store RISC processor, supporting only 32 bit operations on registers
and having word (32bit) and signed char (8bit) load/store operations. 
   I don't have any benchmarks on the Unix version, but the C compiler I have
on my Archimedes warns about the use of shorts (ansi! :), but is _very_ fast
for a desktop computer running at a mixture of 4 and 8 Mhz (Dhrystone results
put it just below an IBM PS2/80).

---Tiggr