One of the deeper dives into RISC vs CISC I've seen

ben bfranchuk at jetnet.ab.ca
Sat Jun 15 17:40:34 CDT 2019


On 6/15/2019 8:47 AM, Stefan Skoglund via cctalk wrote:

> With VAX 11/780 and S/360 involved ? I don't think so soo
> the Cyber series and 709(4) could be interesting.

Well the early 1960's was the rise of BIG IRON that had REAL POWER
and that led to people thinking about high level languages and Computer
Science in general. We got  PL/I (USA) and ALGOL (Every where ELSE)
that is a realy hard to compile into effective code. CISC design is
now needed to handle the 'extended features'. C was simmpler,
but still hand many features. RISC came along only because Compilers
could only generate SIMPLE instructions, that matched the RISC format.
My 2 cents.
Ben.



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