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Warp wrote:
> Darren New <dne### [at] san rrcom> wrote:
>> I don't think that's sufficient to make it a RISC processor. That would
>> mean both the PDP-11 and the X-560 were RISC processors.
>
> Who says they weren't?
Maybe because both were obsolete before the term RISC was invented?
Because neither had lots of variables? Because they both had complex
addressing modes beyond LOAD and STORE? Because they both had
instructions that took variable numbers of cycles?
*I* say they weren't. They might meet your definition of RISC, but I'm
pretty sure your definition doesn't align with the definitions of most
others when talking about it.
> I don't think RISC has been ever defined to mean "you can only perform
> very simple operations with a single opcode". RISC stands for *reduced*
> instruction set computer, not *simplified* instruction set computer.
No, but it also means the ALU only talks to the registers, and there
aren't any complex addressing modes. Neither of those are true of the
two CPUs I named here.
> I don't really understand where the concept of a RISC opcode being
> *simple* has come from.
Well, because that made it fast. Read the link I pointed you to. The
point of reducing the instruction set and addressing modes was to make
it faster and to make more room for registers, by eliminating the
microcode.
> What makes RISC processors simpler is that their fetching and decoding
> steps, pipelines and code caches are simpler because all the opcodes have
> exactly the same size and the meaning of the bits in each opcode has
> been fixed. CISC processors are more complicated because of variable-sized
> opcodes which can contain almost anything.
Again, I think you're oversimplifying. You're using a definition for
RISC at odds with the definition created by the people who created the
term. By leaving off significant portions of the original "meaning" of
the term, you're turning it into a binary situation. However, the
original meaning of RISC has several components (addressing modes,
increased number of registers, simplified decoding), and processors
nowadays combine these things to different degrees.
I think if you asked a modern CPU designer whether he'd consider a
hardware operation equivalent to sprintf() to be "RISC", you'd almost
invariably get the answer "no".
--
Darren New / San Diego, CA, USA (PST)
Helpful housekeeping hints:
Check your feather pillows for holes
before putting them in the washing machine.
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On 14-Jul-08 9:13, Orchid XP v8 wrote:
> Warp wrote:
>
>> How did the world survive before computers, cellphones and frozen
>> pizza?
>
> Quite well, from what I've heard... ;-)
>
I heard it doesn't exist anymore. So I don't think it did so well after all.
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On 14-Jul-08 9:14, Orchid XP v8 wrote:
> Chambers wrote:
>
>> Heh... while I never used the original model, most of the schools
>> where I lived used IIe's or later. As the article says, there are
>> *still* schools around that have labs full of them.
>
> Must be a regional thing... When I was at school, it was the BBC Micro -
> and nothing else!
>
Regional, as in 'country wide monopoly'.
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On 14-Jul-08 16:32, Warp wrote:
> Chambers <ben### [at] pacificwebguycom> wrote:
>> Orchid XP v8 wrote:
>>> But anyway, I was under the impression they used to be M68k-based, and
>>> then PPC, and then recently went to Intel Core 2.
>
>> From Wikipedia*: "Throughout the 1980s and much of the 1990s, the Apple
>> II was the de facto standard computer in American education; some of
>> them are still operational in classrooms today.
>
> There's no use in trying to convince him that Apple computers are or have
> ever been popular anywhere. He will never believe it, no matter how much
> evidence you pour to him.
No, he has vaguely heard of them, but it was before his time. While we
take an active interest in what happens in this world and how that came
about, he doesn't. I didn't believe it possible, until I met Andrew. Now
I have to admit that continuously living in the present is just as valid
and consistent as my way of life. You just have to remember when talking
to him that he has this strange behaviour.
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andrel <a_l### [at] hotmailcom> wrote:
> No, he has vaguely heard of them, but it was before his time. While we
> take an active interest in what happens in this world and how that came
> about, he doesn't. I didn't believe it possible, until I met Andrew. Now
> I have to admit that continuously living in the present is just as valid
> and consistent as my way of life. You just have to remember when talking
> to him that he has this strange behaviour.
Well, Apple computers being rather popular in some places *today* is
the present.
--
- Warp
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Orchid XP v8 wrote:
> But anyway, I was under the impression they used to be M68k-based, and
> then PPC, and then recently went to Intel Core 2.
That was the Mac series. The 8-bit computers that preceded the Mac used
the 6502 (or variants thereof).
Regards,
John
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John VanSickle wrote:
> Orchid XP v8 wrote:
>
>> I just wrote the assembly on a piece of paper, and when the program
>> was properly finished, it'd do the "assembling" part by hand. (I.e.,
>> open my dad's book and leaf through the op-code table.)
>
> Hand assembly was actually a common practice until 16-bit processors
> made this too troublesome;
Actually, it was pretty common before, too. Lots of machines designed to
be programmed in assembler had opcodes organized in a way that made it
easy to remember them and how to code them. If nothing else, it made
debugging via memory dumps easier. (You wonder why C supports octal?)
--
Darren New / San Diego, CA, USA (PST)
Helpful housekeeping hints:
Check your feather pillows for holes
before putting them in the washing machine.
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On 14-Jul-08 21:02, Warp wrote:
> andrel <a_l### [at] hotmailcom> wrote:
>>> There's no use in trying to convince him that Apple computers are or have
>>> ever been popular anywhere. He will never believe it, no matter how much
>>> evidence you pour to him.
>> No, he has vaguely heard of them, but it was before his time. While we
>> take an active interest in what happens in this world and how that came
>> about, he doesn't. I didn't believe it possible, until I met Andrew. Now
>> I have to admit that continuously living in the present is just as valid
>> and consistent as my way of life. You just have to remember when talking
>> to him that he has this strange behaviour.
> Well, Apple computers being rather popular in some places *today* is
> the present.
I don't think Apple ][ computers are much used anymore and that is the
one he was not familiar enough with to know which processor that used.
As I said above that is probably because they were already outdated when
he started using computers. I think there is absolutely no reason to
assume he dislikes them. So to be honest I don't see why you react this
way (I refer to the 3 lines above that I reincluded).
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>> Eventually I tired of this, and wrote my old assembler.
>
> The C64 had a cartridge port on the back end, and one fine company put
> out a cartridge called HESMon, which provided a mini-assembler, memory
> dump and editing, and so on.
Yes. I never did manage to afford one...
--
http://blog.orphi.me.uk/
http://www.zazzle.com/MathematicalOrchid*
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Orchid XP v8 wrote:
> Can somebody find out the typical MIPS and FLOPS for the following:
>
> - Commodore 64 (6510 @ ~1 MHz)
> - ZX Spectrum (Z80 @ 3.5 MHz)
> - Pentium I @ 66 MHz
> - Pentium II @ 233 MHz
> - Pentium III @ 500 MHz
> - Pentium IV @ 4.0 GHz
> - Intel Core 2 Quad @ 3.0 GHz
>
Get SETI@Home host statistics XML file. There is quite a variety of
computers there. <p_model> may or may not have the CPU speed. p_fpops and
p_iops have the floating point and integer benchmark results, respectively
(unit is operations per second, not million operations per second).
http://setiathome.berkeley.edu/stats/host.gz
(Warning: once uncompressed it's about 2GB, don't even *think* of using a
tree-based XML parser unless you have 8GB of RAM)
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