VUPs to MIPS

<I'm not that well up in modern processor design, but I've never heard of <that definition. In fact the ARM becomes CISC by it, I think (?). That was part of the mid 80s def, but by no means an exclusive item. The ARM used more clocks but not many. The early defininition was simply Reduced Instruction Set and raw speed to make up for it. A PDP-8 would qualify in many respects as it has about the smallest useful instruction set going. It's biggest feature is the lack of complexity that allowed CPUs like the ARM and MIPS to be very fast as they were very simple compared to say the 386, the result was the amount of silicon required was less and production costs are lower. Some side effects of the smaller die(fewer transistors) were improved testability, lower power and less heat with attendant higher relibility. Most smaller RISC chips are 10s of thousands of transistors compared to millions in most of the CISC designs. Allison