Newsgroups: comp.sys.amiga.advocacy
Path: utzoo!utgpu!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!rpi!zaphod.mps.ohio-state.edu!menudo.uh.edu!sugar!peter
From: peter@sugar.hackercorp.com (Peter da Silva)
Subject: Re: MIPS (was Re: NeXT Press Release)
Message-ID: <1991Apr28.124704.13825@sugar.hackercorp.com>
Organization: Sugar Land Unix -- Houston, TX
References: <8107@jhunix.HCF.JHU.EDU> <72561@eerie.acsu.Buffalo.EDU> <1991Apr24.043828.7213@uokmax.ecn.uoknor.edu>
Distribution: comp
Date: Sun, 28 Apr 1991 12:47:04 GMT

Will you guys take the CISC versus RISC flamage elsewhere (like comp.arch.mips.
is.better.than.sparc.no.it.isnt)? Anyone who can look at systems and claim that
traditional CISC chips have any advantage in a normal workstation is fooling
themselves.

CISC still has an advantage at the low end, where the memory subsystem isn't
fast enough to keep those RISC monsters fed, but that's fading fast. Certainly
the A3000 is fast enough to feed a RISC chip, and a RISC co-processor card (not
those sluggish transputers... a real RISC like a MIPS or SPARC (or maybe an HP
snake :->)) would be killer. The older 2000 and 500 are better off with a
680x0. I would expect a RISC chip on one of them to actually slow things down.

CISC also has an advantage in the embedded controller market, where memory
constraints limit you to assembly and Forth.

At the very high end, with separate data and instruction memory and many-way
interleaved data memory, the ability of CISCs to schedule multiple data
requests per instruction might give them a bit of an advantage too. There
they're competing with superscalar and VLIW, though.

But for a workstation, running UNIX, why go with a CISC in a new box?
-- 
Peter da Silva.   `-_-'
<peter@sugar.hackercorp.com>.
