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Date:      Mon, 9 Jan 2006 13:27:40 -0500
From:      Garance A Drosihn <drosih@rpi.edu>
To:        danial_thom@yahoo.com
Cc:        freebsd-questions@freebsd.org
Subject:   Re: Sparc vs i386 architecture
Message-ID:  <p0623091ebfe85a662a2b@[128.113.24.47]>
In-Reply-To: <20060108201419.12325.qmail@web33305.mail.mud.yahoo.com>
References:  <20060108201419.12325.qmail@web33305.mail.mud.yahoo.com>

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At 12:14 PM -0800 1/8/06, Danial Thom wrote:
>--- Wojciech Puchar <wojtek@tensor.3miasto.net> wrote:
>  > user Opteron/Athlon64 - better than both :)
>>
>  > AMD made RISC-like architecture that just runs i386-like
>  > code (i386+more registers and few extra instructions,
>  > while lots of mostly-unused instructions emulated).
>
>Thats hilarious, a "reduced instruction set"
>processor that has extra instructions! Good one!

You should think of "RISC" as a "set of reduced instructions",
and not a "reduced set of instructions".  Even IBM's original
RISC had a fairly large *number* of instructions, but fancier
do-all instructions were removed in favor of instructions which
did less, and thus could always complete in fewer CPU cycles.

-- 
Garance Alistair Drosehn            =   gad@gilead.netel.rpi.edu
Senior Systems Programmer           or  gad@freebsd.org
Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute    or  drosih@rpi.edu



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