hal@vicom.COM (Hal Hardenbergh) (05/17/89)
> kirk@maxwell.ece.cmu.edu writes: >It's becoming less clear when a RISC stops being a RISC. Intel's 80960 >has certain features which definitely make the tag of a RISC chip >somewhat questionable. >It seems difficult to decide if the 80960xx is RISC or CISC. >Is it possible that the 80960 is RISC and the 80960MC is CISC? Kirk, you're gonna catch hell from the comp.arch guys. Nick Tredennick had a (5 page?) article in Feb Microprocessor Report about RISCs adopting CISC technology and vice versa, and was universally derided. The fact that Nick is obviously correct is apparently irrelevent. Have you noticed that the 486 can do a push or pop in a single clock cycle? That requires adjusting the pointer as well as a register-memory operation. Ever tried that with a RISC chip? _ANYBODY'S_ RISC chip? Beginning in the fall of '81, every 'expert' was proclaiming the imminent ascendency of UNIX in the personal computer world. The 'experts' still are; the Wall Street Journal recently announced that UNIX's 5% market share would momentarily jump to 38%. A few years back AT&T 'knew' that it was going to sell 100,000 UNIX PCs (aka 7300 or 3B1) a year. Now Sun 'knows' it is going to sell 250,000 SPARCstations a year - without having to go retail !!!!! You gotta stay out of the way of them RISC experts. Heck, RISC has already captured 0.000001% of the 32-bit microprocessor market! :-) Hal Hardenbergh [incl std dsclmr] ames!vsi1!hal hal@vicom.com Vicom Systems Inc 2520 Junction Ave San Jose CA (408) 432-8660 surely nobody here remembers the newsletter DTACK Grounded ?