Sparc vs i386 architecture

[Garance A Drosihn]

At 12:14 PM -0800 1/8/06, Danial Thom wrote:
>--- Wojciech Puchar <wojtek at tensor.3miasto.net> wrote:
>  > user Opteron/Athlon64 - better than both :)
>>
>  > AMD made RISC-like architecture that just runs i386-like
>  > code (i386+more registers and few extra instructions,
>  > while lots of mostly-unused instructions emulated).
>
>Thats hilarious, a "reduced instruction set"
>processor that has extra instructions! Good one!

You should think of "RISC" as a "set of reduced instructions",
and not a "reduced set of instructions".  Even IBM's original
RISC had a fairly large *number* of instructions, but fancier
do-all instructions were removed in favor of instructions which
did less, and thus could always complete in fewer CPU cycles.

-- 
Garance Alistair Drosehn            =   gad at gilead.netel.rpi.edu
Senior Systems Programmer           or  gad at freebsd.org
Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute    or  drosih at rpi.edu