[Info-vax] OT: SONY's PS4 announcment

[Stephen Hoffman]

On 2013-02-23 16:55:40 +0000, Neil Rieck said:

> I never thought I'd see this industry shift from RISC to CISC.

Only if the CISC and RISC designs are what they were back in ~1990?

These designs, flavors or aspirations have been on a collision course 
for a long while, whether it's ever-more-gonzo features added to RISC 
such as out-of-order execution, or the micro-op implementation lurking 
underneath Intel and AMD x86 designs.

The x86 micro-ops designs started back around the Pentium Pro series 
with Intel, and somehwere around K5 with AMD.

Alpha had OOO, and Itanium Poulson now has some OOO capabilities, and 
Itanium is rather far away from either classic CISC or RISC.

FWIW, EPIC/VLIW got its start back in 1989, to address branch 
prediction and some other issues — no pun intended — with then-current 
x86 designs.  Branch prediction success has improved dramatically with 
x86 designs, too.

Designers aren't invested in CISC or RISC (or EPIC/VLIW) "purity" so 
much as obtaining the performance or other practical details that an 
implementation can provide.

These days, most folks are using a mix of ARM and x86 for most stuff, 
with SPARC, Itanium or Power or other lower-volume designs useful for 
some tasks.



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