Article 8799 of alt.sys.pdp10: Path: news3.best.com!news1.best.com!newsfeed.mathworks.com!howland.erols.net!outgoing.news.rcn.net.MISMATCH!feed1.news.rcn.net!rcn!not-for-mail From: "Alan H. Martin" Newsgroups: alt.sys.pdp10 Subject: Re: death of architectures... Date: Mon, 22 May 2000 01:17:17 -0400 Lines: 31 Message-ID: <3928C2DD.B1FC7708@MA.UltraNet.Com> References: <547leyms3t.fsf@flipper.cisco.com> <38F5F2E9.A051A9BB@jetnet.ab.ca> <38f7cd59$0$227@nntp1.ba.best.com> <8d9hi9$b6f$5@bob.news.rcn.net> <38fa0630$0$200@nntp1.ba.best.com> Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit X-Trace: Zw2WKut0AzgwP2H58x82tIl9GZCRjep1ymi+qUf7OlE= X-Complaints-To: abuse@rcn.com NNTP-Posting-Date: 22 May 2000 05:17:56 GMT X-Accept-Language: en,en-US,en-GB,es X-Mailer: Mozilla 4.7 [en] (Win95; U) Xref: news3.best.com alt.sys.pdp10:8799 Joe Smith wrote: > > In article <8d9hi9$b6f$5@bob.news.rcn.net>, wrote: ... > For instance, the PDP-10 had 16 instructions that dealt with boolean > operations on two variables. Some of them were downright worthless; > they existed to make the set of 16 orthogonal. But compilers used > only 5 or 6 of the 16 possible instructions. The design of the SPARC > CPU (used in Sun workstations) implemented only the 6. No use wasting > transistors to implement op-codes that weren't going to make the system > as a whole run faster was the thinking. FORTRAN-10/20 boiled down to these 10 with various addressing and destination modes: AND IOR EQV XOR ANDCM ORCM SETCA SETCM SETZ SETO BLISS-10 used at least these 13 (plus at least some of their addressing and destination variations): AND OR EQV XOR ANDCM ORCM ANDCA ORCA ANDCB ORCB SETCA SETZ SETO (I'm more convinced than ever that all 16 operation families takes little hardware if you provide all of them...) /AHM -- Alan Howard Martin AMartin@MA.UltraNet.Com