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The movie "Hackers" prophesied that RISC was going to "change everything". And it did, but not in these workstations, but rather in smart phones, raspberry pi's
by geocrasher 5y ago
The movie "Hackers" prophesied that RISC was going to "change everything". And it did, but not in these workstations, but rather in smart phones, raspberry pi's and other projects that have made RISC viable again.
- Cockbrand 5y agoAs an aside, I kinda find funny how Apple flip-flops from CISC (68k) to RISC (PPC) to CISC (x86) back to RISC (ARM). Let's see whether RISC is here to stay now.
- pjmlp 5y agoARM is very CISCy in their instruction set.
- mst 5y agoSo far as I can tell, people still call ARM RISC because it's load/store and x86 isn't (feel free to correct me on this, I'm not a CPU person), and ARM's instruction proliferation gets glossed over. I do remember writing asm for the arm26 (arm2) chip in my Archimedes and that was definitely actual RISC, but obviously these days not so much.
- pjmlp 5y agoMost likely, however load/store alone doesn't make a RISC.
- sgerenser 5y agoMy favorite “CISCy” instruction on ARM64 is FJCVTZS: Floating-point Javascript Convert to Signed fixed-point, rounding toward Zero.
- happycube 5y agox86 from Pentium Pro and K6 on are basically hardware x86->RISC recompilers. (This is a good bit of why Transmeta failed in the end, the last good bits of Moore's Law ensured that the recompiling became cheaper/more efficient in hardware)