[rescue] Sun 711

[dave at cca.org]

lefa at cats.ucsc.edu writes:

>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).

That's a good point. Since H&P is the standard textbook anyways,
going with one of their designs (which happen to be nice and clean)
is a good choice.

>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).

Was there ever RISC-I silicon? Or was SPARC the first actual
implimentation?

------ David Fischer ------- dave at cca.org ------- http://www.cca.org ------
-------- "I prefer the ridiculous to the sublime." - James Chance ---------