Path: utzoo!utgpu!water!watmath!clyde!att!pacbell!ames!pasteur!ucbvax!decwrl!hplabs!cae780!leadsv!laic!nova!darin From: darin@nova.laic.uucp (Darin Johnson) Newsgroups: comp.arch Subject: Re: The VAX Always Uses Fewer Instructions Keywords: VAX MIPS Message-ID: <270@laic.UUCP> Date: 22 Jun 88 16:40:04 GMT References: <6921@cit-vax.Caltech.Edu> <28200161@urbsdc> <10595@sol.ARPA> <1277@basser.oz> Sender: news@laic.UUCP Lines: 20 In article <1277@basser.oz>, steve@basser.oz (Stephen Russell) writes: > >In article <914@entropy.ms.washington.edu> mcglk@scott.biostat.washington.edu writes: > >I'm kind of fond of the VAX instruction set, and you can do a heck > >of a lot more with one line of its instruction set than you can with five > >or ten lines of RISC code. > > But is the single VAX instruction actually faster, all else being equal? Perhaps it would be possible for someone to come up with an 'assembler-compiler' that would accept a CISC instruction set and generate RISC code. This would allow one to write using something like 'ADD mem-loc1 to mem-loc2 and store in mem-loc3(R1)' without having write the 5 or 10 RISC lines of code. The biggest drawback I can see, is that there would have to be 'optimizing assemblers'. Of course, such an assembler would find it difficult to take advantage of some common RISC idioms, such as register windows. Just another naive thought from the mind of... Darin Johnson (...pyramid.arpa!leadsv!laic!darin) (...ucbvax!sun!sunncal!leadsv!laic!darin) "All aboard the DOOMED express!"