>Before IBM 801, there have been many simple CPUs, which, if they would be launched today, they would be called RISC CPUs, due to their simplicity. No, I don't

>Before IBM 801, there have been many simple CPUs, which, if they would be launched today, they would be called RISC CPUs, due to their simplicity. No, I don't believe that is the case. Very early computers were simple -- but neither high performance no easy to program -- for that reason. But by 1964, for example, there were already rather complex machines and ISAs such as the IBM 360. Also in 1964 was Seymour Cray's CDC 6600, a complex high end machine with 10 functional units and superscalar out-of-order execution, but deliberately simple instructions that separated load/store from arithmetic. It would definitely and deservedly get the term "RISC" if introduced today. The same goes for the Cray 1, which was also before the 801 project. >While John Cocke has not invented the word RISC when designing IBM 801, either he or another member of his team (which worked at the project that eventually became IBM POWER) has invented the word "superscalar", a few years later, in 1987, when the design target for CPUs had moved from being able to execute one instruction in a single clock cycle, like in the early RISC CPUs, to being able to execute multiple instructions per clock cycle. Again, the 1984 CDC 6600 was superscalar. As indeed were high end IBM 360s. The term didn't exist then, but the techniques (scoreboard on CDC, Tomasulo's algorithm on IBM 360/91) did.