🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <8283@uceng.UC.EDU> dmocsny@minerva.che.uc.edu (Daniel Mocsny) writes:
>If RISC gets 5 years ahead of CISC in hardware speed, that will be
>enough to counter its software lag, which is probably of the same
>order. (I.e., if present trends continue, the software available in
>5 years for the current major RISC families, assuming they preserve 
>binary compatibility, *might* resemble the software available NOW for 
>the 80x86 family, in terms of range and price. However, leading-edge
>hardware seems hard-pressed to maintain binary compatibility very
>far backwards. This is *precisely* the software advantage and
>hardware disadvantage of CISC.)

>Do comp.arch pundits see RISC chips widening their gap over the
>CISC chips? If the performance gap stays at a factor of two or three,
>that represents a ~2 year hardware delay for CISC, which doesn't seem
>large compared to the ~5 year software lead for CISC. Also, consider
>that very few individual users are able to keep even a '386 machine
>busy all the time. To do even that is an intense, full-time job for
>anyone whose problem can't be solved in one "for" loop.

>average Sparcstation, primarily because the average PC or Mac user can 
>afford more applications. The average useful program, if available
>under UNIX, costs 2--10 times as much as the DOS or Mac equivalent.
>This problem isn't going away anytime soon.
>
>Of course, since CISC and RISC are Turing-equivalent, there is no
>fundamental reason why the software lead of CISC should be immutable.
>In the real world, however, transparent portability across 
>architectures appears elusive, for a variety of reasons, and most
>of them seem rather silly.

All of this sounds like a plausible argument ... 6 years ago.
So, explain why  almost every major computer company (and now including
	most of the larger PC companies) either is already shipping
	a RISC-based product.....
	Are they all fools?

Note that "the i386 is enough" is looking through the rear-view mirror;
you can do some terrific things if you can get 50-100 mips cheap;
(mostly to make computers a lot easier to use).
Aggressive software developers out there understand this and are working
in that direction, because it's going to happen.

------------
Following note is to somebody from CMU that asked about cfc1 instruction,
but whose mail I lost somewhere:  cfc1 stalls until all operations complete;
the double cfc1s you saw should not be there, there was some case for
an old FP board years ago, but the double cfc1 should be long gone.
-- 
-john mashey	DISCLAIMER: <generic disclaimer, I speak for me only, etc>
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