Reproduction micros

Peter Corlett abuse at cabal.org.uk
Tue Jul 19 10:04:11 CDT 2016


On Tue, Jul 19, 2016 at 03:30:19PM +0200, Liam Proven wrote:
[...]
> There's a hint here, though:
> https://www.epo.org/learning-events/european-inventor/finalists/2013/wilson/feature.html

>From there, it seems to be saying that the essence of the invention is that the
ARM ISA is RISC, it is a load-store architecture, and the CPU was pipelined.

RISC implies a load-store architecture, so that claim is redundant.

Pipelining is an older idea: the 1979-vintage 68000 does it, and the 1982-vintage
68010 even detects certain string/loop instructions in its pipeline and avoids
re-fetching them from memory when repeating the sequence.

IMO, it's the predicated instructions that is ARM's special sauce and the real
innovation that gives it a performance boost. Without those, it'd be just a 32
bit wide 6502 knockoff.



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