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I think that's the real advantage of RISC architectures - a small spec leaves less space for problems. Not no space, but less space.
by drpixie 4y ago
I think that's the real advantage of RISC architectures - a small spec leaves less space for problems. Not no space, but less space.
- rurban 4y agoYes, but the various HW bugs and exploits, e.g cache leaks and poisoning - Spectre, Meltdown, ..., are not handled. Also not in the mentioned and formally proven crypto libs.
- sbf501 4y agoAdvantage over what? The idea that RISC is somehow simpler went the way of the dinosaur 30 years ago. The ISA does not define performance, that is the microarchitecture, which is where all of the engineering effort is spent. You can have the classic ISA of the Turing Machine that we all learned about in comp-sci 101 classes: "Load/Store/Add/Compare/Jump" and it would be simple but dog-ass slow. Not to mention open to all sorts of attacks and exploits (buffer overflows, stack smashing), and meta attacks (side-channel), or Goedels incompleteness. The uarch is where the action happens.
- drpixie 4y agoWe were talking about correctness. RISCs by definition have simpler architectures that CISCs - that's what makes them RISCs. And simpler architectures leave less room for confusion/bugs/faults in the architecture, irrespective how they are implemented.