4 ms·

Thanks for this reply. The next question I guess is whether we do this because of experience or because of debate? Your examples of CISC instructions are speci

Thanks for this reply. The next question I guess is whether we do this because of experience or because of debate? Your examples of CISC instructions are specialised, as one would expect, so maybe the earlier generations of engineers simply expected more specialised machines? Ironically perhaps, with the bitcoin era, there is now more interest in specialised machines again, though my impression is hardware manifacturers are more focused on practicality. Maybe people have realised the benefit of a general CISCy-RISC architechture for the sake of not wasting time with debate?

dragontamer 7y ago
CPU Engineers always designed for the needs of their customers: with early computers having much better support for decimal arithmetic (which was popular in the 60s through 80s, but less popular today). Overall, today's high-performance CPU programmers (and their tools: particularly their compilers) have a set of expectations, and CPU Engineers are designing their computers with those expectations in mind. That's really all there is too it.