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Politics : Formerly About Advanced Micro Devices -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Tenchusatsu who wrote (44282)	12/29/1998 5:27:00 PM
From: Kevin K. Spurway	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 1572629

Re: "whether you can just feed it RISC instructions and get rid of the x86 baggage altogether." If you could, and you could transition x86 to pure RISC gradually in this way, why would we need Merced?

To: Tenchusatsu who wrote (44282)	12/29/1998 7:33:00 PM
From: Bill Jackson	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 1572629

Tenchusatsu, Since both risc and cisc are transcribed into these internal op codes then there is no reason why the processor cannot accept mingled risc and cisc instructions as it will sort them out into those op-codes and do the work, like embedded machine code in certain compiled languages. That way the programmers could transition their products to risc and gradually leave the x86 baggage behind, while keeping the ablity to run x86 when legacy programs are encountered. Does this ablity penalize the system? In theory the risc would get a royal road through to execution and the cisc would have the delay of the decoders, thus more risc would bring the Intel P-II back into balance as the slower front ends would do less and thus feed the larger and faster back end and that would become the limiting operational stage, and since Intel has more one would expect that it would go far ahead of AMD on risc instructions. Will the KNI further this end by being risc? Bill