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RISC Is Fundamentally Unscalable

• api 7y ago
  CISC is basically a specialized data compression codec for micro-ops. That is all.
  • afiori 7y ago
    But his point on pipelining vs VLIW seems valid
• jepler 7y ago
  "Practicality beats purity", and conversions like integer<>floating point are ripe for efficient implementation using a small number of gates. CVT.W.D in MIPS did that decades ago (including setting a condition bit for cases which could not be converted). In a world where, for better or for worse, "how fast it runs javascript" is an important metric, engineers (armed with copious execution traces of real world software) should make a rational choice and find a way to include FJCVTZS in an instruction set next to other more traditional conversions like whatever ARM's equivalent of CVT.W.D is.