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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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