On: John Mashey on RISC/CISC

[kps]

  > and the instruction set is "interesting" (a bit-twiddler/
  > superoptimizer's wet dream, if you ask me

All fallen by the wayside in Thumb and ARM64, now.

  > but probably "risc" by many definitions of the term

What ARM lacked in academic purity it made up in pragmatic simplicity of implementation. You could look at the instruction set and practically see the gates.

[renox → kps]

> What ARM lacked in academic purity it made up in pragmatic simplicity of implementation

'pragmatic simplicity of implementation'? Mmm, what about LDM/STM (load/store multiple registers)?

Of course they dropped this with the ARMv8 (64bit) ISA..

I wonder if they are still interesting differences between the ARMv8 and the MIPS ISA? From my (uninformed) POV they look very similar..