31–40 of 117 posts
We looked at some popular RISC and CISC architectures, even looked at Itanium [1] as it was the hot new thing at the time. The professor didn't necessarily hate Intel, just the x86 architecture.
IP issues. As I understand it, Harris and Harris changed their textbook from ARM to RISC-V because of IP issues and ARM's lawyers. The MIPS architecture was also sabotaged by IP issues. As a result, architecture students are learning how to use and implement RISC-V. Thanks ARM.
I had a lot of fun spending most of my time in that class writing an entire development stack for that architecture: assembler, simulator, debugger, and eventually a very barebones forth!
IIRC, I learned computer architecture with a mythical 13 instruction set ISA. The class started with the basics of using flip flops to build registers and memory, program counters, etc. We had to demonstrate the state of every register at a given line in assembly. We had to write our own assembly. Then we learned C and how to translate it into assembly. The dots were connected from logic gates to to a high level stac…
https://www.arl.wustl.edu/~jon.turner/cse/260/lec/washu2-1.p...
Some platforms are not great pedagogically, but are taught because they are used in industry, like x86.
ARM manages to be ok at both.
I don't see a point in learning with other architectures.
IP issues. As I understand it, Harris and Harris changed their textbook from ARM to RISC-V because of IP issues and ARM's lawyers. The MIPS architecture was also sabotaged by IP issues. As a result, architecture students are learning how to use and implement RISC-V. Thanks ARM.
Restricting teaching with it or charging students the high corporate fees are just going to backfire in the long run. People will learn with whatever is cheap or free .
Davinci Resolve is getting more popular, because it's "free" and Adobe is a buggy piece of shit. Blender got popular, because learning at home, with any other software was way too expensive.
IP issues. As I understand it, Harris and Harris changed their textbook from ARM to RISC-V because of IP issues and ARM's lawyers. The MIPS architecture was also sabotaged by IP issues. As a result, architecture students are learning how to use and implement RISC-V. Thanks ARM.
Really?! You'd think ARM would do backflips to get the curriculum to include their architecture.
Much as I also have never understood universities teaching to "teaching" architectures (DLX), or "teaching" languages (Eiffel - luckily removed from our curriculum before I started), at the same time I did not land a job based on having learned "practical" architectures 68k or MIPS either.
Hey I learned Eiffel. It's a nice language. I wish we had pre-conditions and post-conditions in modern procedural language.
Still, picking something simple makes lot of sense as pedagogical tool. x86 is outright mess and ARM is probably going to that direction on long term as well. So something more locked down and fully explainable is the better choice. If students want to do assembly they then can pick what they need.