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From: Thomas Koenig <tkoenig@netcologne.de>
Newsgroups: comp.arch
Subject: Re: Why VAX Was the Ultimate CISC and Not RISC
Date: Wed, 5 Mar 2025 21:15:44 -0000 (UTC)
Organization: A noiseless patient Spider
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Stefan Monnier <monnier@iro.umontreal.ca> schrieb:
> Anton Ertl [2025-03-01 11:58:17] wrote:
>> Bottom line: If you sent, e.g., me and the needed documents back in
>> time to the start of the VAX project, and gave me a magic wand that
>> would convince the DEC management and workforce that I know how to
>> design their next architecture, and how to compiler for it, I would
>> give the implementation team RV32GC as architecture to implement, and
>> that they should use pipelining for that, and of course also give that
>> to the software people.
>
> I wonder if an RV32GC would be competitive if implemented in the
> technology available back in 1977 (when the VAX-11/780 came out,
> according to Wikipedia).

RISC in general could have been - the 801 (although it was
implemented in ECL), HP's first HP-PA, implemented in TTL,  and
ARM show that.