Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!husc6!mailrus!ames!oliveb!apple!oracle!csimmons
From: csimmons@oracle.com (Charles Simmons)
Newsgroups: comp.arch
Subject: Re: Intel/MIPS Dhrystone ratio
Message-ID: <801@oracle.oracle.com>
Date: 18 Mar 89 06:20:08 GMT
References: <1552@vicom.COM> <15690@cup.portal.com> <1562@vicom.COM> <37196@bbn.COM> <1989Mar16.190043.23227@utzoo.uucp>
Sender: news@oracle.com
Reply-To: csimmons@oracle.UUCP (Charles Simmons)
Organization: Oracle Corporation, Belmont, CA
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In article <1989Mar16.190043.23227@utzoo.uucp> henry@utzoo.uucp (Henry Spencer) writes:
>In article <37196@bbn.COM> slackey@BBN.COM (Stan Lackey) writes:
>>The trend in computer evolution is truly toward greater hardware
>>complexity.  This has been demonstrated countless times.  The
>>reversion back to too much simplicity did happen in the late 70's, but
>>here we are again, back on the same curve...
>
>Except, this time the complexity added will be *useful* complexity, with
>any luck.  No, we are not headed back towards CISC.

I'd have to agree with Henry completely.  One possible alternative
way of looking at this is that CISC technology, especially the VAX,
was developed during a period of time when a lot of programs were
written in assembler.  If you look carefully at the MIPS architechture
and the output of its C compiler, you'll soon discover that on a MIPS
machine, there is absolutely no reason to program in assembler.

Since one of the fundamental tenets of RISC design is that all programs
will be written in a high-level language, we aren't going to see
instructions sets that are real complicated for the simple fact that
the compilers can't deal with the complexity.

-- Chuck