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From: Robert Swindells <rjs@fdy2.co.uk>
Newsgroups: comp.arch
Subject: Re: Why VAX Was the Ultimate CISC and Not RISC
Date: Sun, 2 Mar 2025 15:42:53 -0000 (UTC)
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On Sun, 02 Mar 2025 09:34:37 GMT, Anton Ertl wrote:

> mitchalsup@aol.com (MitchAlsup1) writes:
> 
>>A pipelined machine in 1978 would have had 50% to 100% more circuit
>>boards than VAX 11/780, making it a lot more expensive.
> 
> What makes you think that a pipelined single-issue RV32GC would take
> more circuit boards than VAX11/780?  I have no data about discrete
> implementations, but if we look at integrated ones and assume that the
> number of transistors or the area corresponds to the number of circuit
> boards in discrete implementations, the evidence goes in the opposite
> direction:

You could look at the MIT Lisp Machine, it used basically the same chips
as a VAX 11/780 but was a pipelined load/store architecture internally.