3 ms·
No, it's just that the fact that RISC didn't have any load-op-store instructions made it easier to pipeline them back in the day while still being able to handl
by Symmetry 6y ago
No, it's just that the fact that RISC didn't have any load-op-store instructions made it easier to pipeline them back in the day while still being able to handle interrupts as if they executed one instruction at a time and there was one instruction that had executed while the following one hadn't executed at all. That's possible to do with CISC architectures, of course, we do it all the time these days. But back in the day being able to implement that easily-ish in a reasonable number of transistors were a big factor in early RISC processors having so much better performance than the CISCs of the time.
In the modern day it mostly just means that you can implement fancy out of order schenanigans with a bit fewer engineer-years than non-RISC ISAs.
- bogomipz 6y agoThanks these are both very helpful and good bits of historical perspective as well. Cheers.