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Just give me a simple CPU and some I/O ports

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Re: Just give me a simple CPU and some I/O ports

#51

Post by anamax »

tyvkiuiyi wrote: post #36
anamax wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> RISC has much more flexibility with regards to automatic optimization, pipelining, etc. Folks designing processors haven't believed that since before the Pentium was introduced. (I went to dinner with some of the MIPS principals right after the first Pentium tech talk. Their conclusion was that everyone would finally figure out that the RISC/CISC wars were over and they'd lost.) There are lots of things that go int…

Tell that to the people at ARM who ship 10 RISC cpus for every Intel desktop chip out there.

If we're counting CPUs shipped, ARM is in the noise compared to 6502 and the like, let alone the 8051s.

The claim was that RISC had certain advantages that would have significant performance or cost consequences. That hasn't happened. ARM wins where it wins for reasons that have nothing to do with RISC/CISC.

Re: Just give me a simple CPU and some I/O ports

#52

Post by anamax »

Locke1689 wrote: post #45
anamax wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> RISC has much more flexibility with regards to automatic optimization, pipelining, etc. Folks designing processors haven't believed that since before the Pentium was introduced. (I went to dinner with some of the MIPS principals right after the first Pentium tech talk. Their conclusion was that everyone would finally figure out that the RISC/CISC wars were over and they'd lost.) There are lots of things that go int…

RISC won. Intel continues to ship with CISC style artifacts, but that is only because Intel has almost never removed a feature from its microprocessors. However, the actual processor implementation is designed with CPU microcode, which is a RISC architecture. Even when you think you are doing something "CISCy" in an Intel proc, it's translated to RISC behind the scene.

> RISC won.

Yup, MIPS and SUN are a thriving companies and Intel shut down.

> However, the actual processor implementation is designed with CPU microcode, which is a RISC architecture. Even when you think you are doing something "CISCy" in an Intel proc, it's translated to RISC behind the scene.

Do you really think that RISC machines don't have microcode? (They also have multi-cycle instructions and the like.)

The claim was that RISC ISAs had inherent advantages that would cause CISC ISAs to be uncompetitive. That claiim was wrong.

Re: Just give me a simple CPU and some I/O ports

#53

Post by anamax »

Goladus wrote: post #44
anamax wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> RISC has much more flexibility with regards to automatic optimization, pipelining, etc. Folks designing processors haven't believed that since before the Pentium was introduced. (I went to dinner with some of the MIPS principals right after the first Pentium tech talk. Their conclusion was that everyone would finally figure out that the RISC/CISC wars were over and they'd lost.) There are lots of things that go int…

When pentium was introduced? Yeah, it looked like RISC had lost. But that was not because it wasn't a better design, but because Intel had a lot invested in the x86 and that's the processor that was used in the PC. Now that mobile devices are becoming as important or more important than PCs, the field has changed. Also, it's possible that RISC's parallel processing advantages will matter given the current trend towar…

> RISC's parallel processing advantages will matter given the current trend toward multiple processors and multiple cores.

What are these "parallel processing advantages"?

Re: Just give me a simple CPU and some I/O ports

#54

Post by Retric »

rbanffy wrote: post #21
Retric wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's just physics. For a given transistor, more transistors @ higher frequency = more power. At the ultra low end people are using processors that run using energy collected from stray radio waves. While a better design and instruction set help unlike desktop computing the standard is already lean.

Still, accounting for the vast differences in process, I think a full 45nm Apple II could run on stray radio waves

I don't know if anyone makes a 45 nm 8 bit cpu. Intel makes 8 bit chips, and has 45 nm and smaller fabs, but I don't the market is there yet.

Still the original Apple II was 1Mhz, with 4kb of ram which is significantly faster and more powerful than many micro controllers in use today. For many solutions the power savings of sub 40khz speeds is still worth it so I don't think we are at the point where stray radio waves could power a system that fast.

Re: Just give me a simple CPU and some I/O ports

#55

Post by abalashov »

mechanical_fish wrote: post #9
abalashov wrote: post #3

I've been having that exact thought for quite some time now. It seems that the art of programming - or at least, the practice of it, equivalent to "proficiency" or "competency" - has shifted from fundamentals of the machine and the language's intrinsic semantics, which allowed you to actually create something anew, to spending 90-95% of the time trying to figure out someone else's API. In other words, the real skill…

I know where you're coming from, but I wonder if this observation is just a classic language rant waiting to be born. In other words: I wonder if the problem is not that all higher-level APIs necessarily suck, but that the ones you have suck, and your language platform is too impoverished to profitably work around that. API design is hard . It's like composing poetry, or trying to design the game of chess. ("I know,…

I'm not saying that there aren't real, valid reasons for the state of things today to have evolved in the manner I described. And I completely agree that designing APIs well, and doing object-oriented design hierarchy well in the manner in which it was intended is a formidable problem domain. Never did I mean to imply that it wasn't. And certainly, there is a qualitative, artistic dimension to the way in which one goes about stringing various APIs together, too.

Nevertheless, the fact remains that today when I - and many others - program, we're spending 90% of our time putting together the pieces of some reference. Back when I was growing up writing code in C, there wasn't so much of that, aside from the sparse library functions and, of course, system calls. I actually felt like I was writing a lot of code; maybe unnecessary code from a contemporary point of view (lots of linked list containers, hash table implementations, etc.), but definitely code, and I was writing it. There's something in that productive bliss that's gone today, when it's basically a question of figuring out what the javadocs say.

Re: Just give me a simple CPU and some I/O ports

#56

Post by billswift »

Off-topic, but someone mentioned Forth chips in a comment here, and I have read about Lisp machines, and C is often referred to as high-level assembly language - has anyone tried making a computer that actually runs C or a strong subset of it as its actual assembler?
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