Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!ubvax!ames!lamaster
From: lamaster@ames.arc.nasa.gov (Hugh LaMaster)
Newsgroups: comp.arch
Subject: Re: RISC bashing at USENIX
Message-ID: <11720@ames.arc.nasa.gov>
Date: 13 Jul 88 17:23:09 GMT
References: <6888@ico.ISC.COM> <5242@june.cs.washington.edu>
Reply-To: lamaster@ames.arc.nasa.gov.UUCP (Hugh LaMaster)
Organization: NASA Ames Research Center, Moffett Field, Calif.
Lines: 37

>[ RISC bashing at Usenix ]


Before you shed too many tears about poor RISC people being bashed,
just remember all the hype with which "RISC" was marketed to the
computing world 5 (?) years ago.  And remember, back then, that
supposedly things like arithmetic speed and memory bandwidth didn't
matter, according to the RISC camp.  Now that we have new processors
like the MIPS R3000/R3010 and the Motorola 88K series, to mention
a couple of recent designs, things have come a long way.

Rather than say that RISC or CISC won, I think a more fair way to sum
up what really happened is to say that performance won.  Conventional
wisdom 15 years ago (at, say, IBM and CDC) was that there would always
be a very limited demand for high performance systems.  What happened
was quite different.  People found maximum performance useful in
systems of all price categories.  This was not anticipated by a lot
of people.  But whether that performance is provided by a RISC or
CISC system does not matter to the end user.

That aside, it warms my heart to see MIPS (R3000/R3010) and Motorola
(88K series) battling it out over performance on benchmarks like
Linpack and the Livermore Loops.  Just two years ago, these companies
were leaving floating point/memory intensive job performance to the
mainframe bunch.  The latest MIPS performance brief shows, among other
things, the MIPS M/2000 system weighing in at 3.6 64 bit Fortran MFLOPS-
faster than the CDC 7600.  Now that is progress.

[By the way, my hat is off to MIPS for their latest performance brief
(3.4 - dated June 1988).  Good job.  I wish every company would
provide a report like this.]

-- 
  Hugh LaMaster, m/s 233-9,  UUCP ames!lamaster
  NASA Ames Research Center  ARPA lamaster@ames.arc.nasa.gov
  Moffett Field, CA 94035     
  Phone:  (415)694-6117