Newsgroups: comp.arch
Path: utzoo!henry
From: henry@utzoo.uucp (Henry Spencer)
Subject: Re: IBM RISC
Message-ID: <1990Feb22.175120.12835@utzoo.uucp>
Organization: U of Toronto Zoology
References: <9376@portia.Stanford.EDU> <192@zds-ux.UUCP>
Date: Thu, 22 Feb 90 17:51:20 GMT

In article <192@zds-ux.UUCP> gerry@zds-ux.UUCP (Gerry Gleason) writes:
>The real question for Sun (and others) is whether the architectural
>features of the 6000 really are that big of a win...
>... Probably multiple functional units operating
>in parallel are a big win, if complexity doesn't kill you (HW and SW).
>If true, Sun will need to develop a SPARCII and MIPS a MIPSII instruction
>set...

Um, I haven't followed the details of the new IBM stuff, but my impression
is that most of the "super-scalar" parallelism being touted is just
parallelism between integer and floating-point operations, which both
MIPS and SPARC have had from the beginning...
-- 
"The N in NFS stands for Not, |     Henry Spencer at U of Toronto Zoology
or Need, or perhaps Nightmare"| uunet!attcan!utzoo!henry henry@zoo.toronto.edu