[rescue] Sun 711

[Francisco Javier Mesa-Martinez]

On Thu, 2 May 2002, Dave McGuire wrote:

> On May 2, Bill Bradford wrote:
> > On Thu, May 02, 2002 at 01:24:00AM -0400, Dave McGuire wrote:
> > >   Ahh, one of their last *good* processor designs.
> > <snip>
> > >   Agreed.  Though their processor design borders on the absurd.
> > 
> > Would you recommend the PDP-11 architecture as being good to study for
> > a beginner student on computer architecture and processor workings?
> 
>   Most definitely, yes.

I disagree, altough the PDP-11 might have some historical value, I'd
recommend starting with MIPS (R2/3000). It is an elegant, easy to
understand design. And it has a lot of modern features, like pipelining,
large number of registers, cache, and of course it is really clean
and simple! Plus you can alway get SPIM and run your assembly so yo do not
need to get a mips machine even. And of course you can use MIPS in
conjuction with THE BOOK by Hennessy and Patterson. Which is a must for
anyone interested in the field of computer architecture (We use it for the
the graduate level computer architecture class I am TAing this quarter).

Also you can pick up some SPARC references, since this is a SUN list
right? And play with the assembler. SPARC is not as elegant as the MIPS
but it can easily be coupled with THE BOOK. (Hennesy was one of the main
cheeses in the early development of MIPS and Stanford, and Patterson was
the main guy behind RISC-I at Cal, which later evolved into SPARC).

Just my 2 cents.