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When teaching computer architecture, why are universities using obscure CPUs?

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Re: When teaching computer architecture, why are universities using obscure CPUs?

#21

Post by gentleman11 »

aeldidi wrote: post #17

My local university used to teach MIPS, and as of some years ago they’ve switched to RISC-V. The final assignment at the time I took it was to write a program which compiles a subset of ARM machine code into RISC-V machine code, which was a challenging but so rewarding thing for a younger me to cut my teeth on. It was a surprisingly modern class too. The in-class material was learning about pipelining, instruction/me…

MIPS is great. You can learn it in great depth and fully understand the whole microprocessor while compacting it into a single class. You can make your own adder and multiplier with logic gates. It’s a scope that you can actually master

Re: When teaching computer architecture, why are universities using obscure CPUs?

#22

Post by cgh »

fsmv wrote: post #16

You can teach 8086 assembly which is still compatible with modern x86 and it only has like 20 instructions. It's lots of fun I made a whole bootable text editor an assembler and an almost finished lisp interpreter too.

Yeah we learned x86 assembly at my school too. We had to make a “database” (basically a flat file), complete with a text-based ui.

Re: When teaching computer architecture, why are universities using obscure CPUs?

#23

Post by musicale »

Personally I like Niklaus Wirth's minimal RISC-5 (not to be confused with RISC-V). Wirth's systems were simple enough to understand from top to bottom, and RISC-5 was easy to emulate in software or on an FPGA (I also like Wirth's LoLa language.)

https://people.inf.ethz.ch/wirth/ProjectOberon/RISC5.Update....

Re: When teaching computer architecture, why are universities using obscure CPUs?

#28

Post by musicale »

gentleman11 wrote: post #21
aeldidi wrote: post #17

My local university used to teach MIPS, and as of some years ago they’ve switched to RISC-V. The final assignment at the time I took it was to write a program which compiles a subset of ARM machine code into RISC-V machine code, which was a challenging but so rewarding thing for a younger me to cut my teeth on. It was a surprisingly modern class too. The in-class material was learning about pipelining, instruction/me…

MIPS is great. You can learn it in great depth and fully understand the whole microprocessor while compacting it into a single class. You can make your own adder and multiplier with logic gates. It’s a scope that you can actually master

I agree. It's a shame that MIPS is mostly dead at this point.

(And a moment of silence for SPARC and OpenSPARC T1/T2 in particular - full 64-bit CPUs that were used in production.)

However, RISC-V shares most of the implementation benefits of MIPS, is unencumbered by IP issues, and seems to be steadily improving in terms of software and hardware support.

Re: When teaching computer architecture, why are universities using obscure CPUs?

#30

Post by musicale »

KingOfCoders wrote: post #25

OT Does anyone know a nice TTL computer with leds to register content that I can buy soldered?

Not what you're looking for I know, but I am reminded of: https://monster6502.com

And: http://visual6502.org/JSSim/index.html

(HN law mandates at least one 6502 post per week. Preferably more.)

And lest we forget (not 6502, not commercial, but some TTL): https://www.homebrewcpuring.org/ringhome.html

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