By: Mark Roulo (nothanks.delete@this.xxx.com), November 24, 2014 6:42 pm
Room: Moderated Discussions
Linus Torvalds (torvalds.delete@this.linux-foundation.org) on November 24, 2014 6:17 pm wrote:
> Would it be worth it to resurrect the VAX instruction set? Obviously not. But I think the argument
> in this thread was that once you get over a certain stage in technology, the "that's practically unimplementable"
> part goes away. The VAX instruction set isn't really amenable to straightforward instruction pipelining,
> no. But that doesn't mean that it isn't amenable to more modern techniques..
Can you survive long enough to get to having enough resources to do this using VAX ISA? I don't know, but I can see this looking like a huge risk. The Motorola 68K guys gave up after pipelining and before OoO ... and they shipped a lot more CPUs than DEC (lower margins, of course).
> Would it be worth it to resurrect the VAX instruction set? Obviously not. But I think the argument
> in this thread was that once you get over a certain stage in technology, the "that's practically unimplementable"
> part goes away. The VAX instruction set isn't really amenable to straightforward instruction pipelining,
> no. But that doesn't mean that it isn't amenable to more modern techniques..
Can you survive long enough to get to having enough resources to do this using VAX ISA? I don't know, but I can see this looking like a huge risk. The Motorola 68K guys gave up after pipelining and before OoO ... and they shipped a lot more CPUs than DEC (lower margins, of course).
