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The author addresses this: > It’s possible to nitpick RISC being a no by saying that modern processors translate x86 ops into RISC micro-ops internally, but if
by thristian 11y ago
The author addresses this:
> It’s possible to nitpick RISC being a no by saying that modern processors translate x86 ops into RISC micro-ops internally, but if you listened to talk at the time, people thought that having a external RISC ISA would be so much lower overhead that RISC would win, which has clearly not happened. Moreover, modern chips also do micro-op fusion in order to fuse operations into decidedly un-RISC-y operations.
- wodenokoto 11y agoThe success criteria is not mentioned at all, so there is no clear way of settling this. yes the brand "risc" failed, but does that mean the idea behind risc presented by the computer science community failed? I'm no processor expert, but it sounds like to me the paradigm behind risc is both theoretical and practically sound and is a key component in most modern CPU's.
- qznc 11y agoI would disagree. Intel adds more and more special instructions for niche uses (crypto,HPC,virtualization,etc) for the sake of efficiency. This becomes increasingly necessary for performance improvements, because frequency scaling hit its boundary for now and manycore is about to (see Dark Silicon).
- varjag 11y agoOne point of RISC was better production yield due to higher die regularity. By this criterion RISC clearly won, and this is also one of the driving factors to CISC-as-microcoded-RISC approach.