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Re: [microsound] computers and DSP



> Actually, there's one more important factor.  Motorola chips are RISC
> (reduced instruction set) type, which means that they perform less
> instructions for a given calculation.

Actually I think that's backwards ~ RISC chips perform more instructions
for a given (complex) operation, because they don't have esoteric
instructions to perform such operations directly.  However they balance
this by using a fixed instruction word size, or always using a fixed
number of cycles per instruction (fewer than otherwise).

At least, that's how it works down at the level of RISC chips I program ~
which are babies.  :)

FWIW there're a lot of great, very lay-readable whitepapers on
contemporary processor design (including discussions of 'sexy' topics like
symmetrical multiprocessing, 'hyperthreading', altivec, pipelining,
out-of-order execution, etc ad nauseum) at www.arstechnica.com ~ one of
the guys who runs the site is a serious CPU hack...

Best,

 aaron

  ghede@xxxxxxxx
  http://www.quietamerican.org

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