Is MIPS Dead? Lawsuit, Bankruptcy, Maintainers Leaving and More

Re:Is MIPS Dead? Lawsuit, Bankruptcy, Maintainers Leaving an... by glangdale on Wednesday April 22, 2020 @10:26PM (#22952282)

RISC has never been about reduced number of instructions, but their complexity. A SIMD extension built around load/store architecture is quite compatible with the principles of RISC, despite the fact that such an extension might have very numerous instructions.

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Re:Is MIPS Dead? Lawsuit, Bankruptcy, Maintainers Leaving an... by yjftsjthsd-h on Thursday April 23, 2020 @01:01PM (#22958125)

Well, I learned something today:) I'd always assumed that RISC meant a reduced number of instructions, but that's clearly not the case. Wikipedia phrases it as,

> The term "reduced" in that phrase was intended to describe the fact that the amount of work any single instruction accomplishes is reduced—at most a single data memory cycle—compared to the "complex instructions" of CISC CPUs that may require dozens of data memory cycles in order to execute a single instruction.[23] In particular, RISC processors typically have separate instructions for I/O and data processing.

So yeah, if SIMD instructions can execute in a single cycle (or maybe even a small number), then it still counts.

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