12.2 Fundamental of risc

A RISC machine could have been built in 1960. (In fact, Seymour Cray built one in 1964 — the CDC 6600.) However, given the same costs of components, technical barriers, and even expectations for how computers would be used, you would probably still have chosen a CISC design — even with the benefit of hindsight.

The exact inspiration that led to developing high performance RISC microprocessors in the 1980s is a subject of some debate. Regardless of the motivation of the RISC designers, there were several obvious pressures that affected the development of RISC:

• The number of transistors that could fit on a single chip was increasing. It was clear that one would eventually be able to fit all the components from a processor board onto a single chip.
• Techniques such as pipelining were being explored to improve performance. Variable-length instructions and variable-length instruction execution times (due to varying numbers of microcode steps) made implementing pipelines more difficult.
• As compilers improved, they found that well-optimized sequences of stream- lined instructions often outperformed the equivalent complicated multi-cycle instructions. (See Appendix A, Processor Architectures, and Appendix B, Looking at Assembly Language.)

The RISC designers sought to create a high performance single-chip processor with a fast clock rate. When a CPU can fit on a single chip, its cost is decreased, its reliability is increased, and its clock speed can be increased. While not all RISC processors are single-chip implementation, most use a single chip.

To accomplish this task, it was necessary to discard the existing CISC instruction sets and develop a new minimal instruction set that could fit on a single chip. Hence the term reduced instruction set computer . In a sense reducing the instruction set was not an “end” but a means to an end.

For the first generation of RISC chips, the restrictions on the number of components that could be manufactured on a single chip were severe, forcing the designers to leave out hardware support for some instructions. The earliest RISC processors had no floating-point support in hardware, and some did not even support integer multiply in hardware. However, these instructions could be implemented using software routines that combined other instructions (a microcode of sorts).

These earliest RISC processors (most severely reduced) were not overwhelming successes for four reasons:

• It took time for compilers, operating systems, and user software to be retuned to take advantage of the new processors.
• If an application depended on the performance of one of the software-implemented instructions, its performance suffered dramatically.
• Because RISC instructions were simpler, more instructions were needed to accomplish the task.
• Because all the RISC instructions were 32 bits long, and commonly used CISC instructions were as short as 8 bits, RISC program executables were often larger.

As a result of these last two issues, a RISC program may have to fetch more memory for its instructions than a CISC program. This increased appetite for instructions actually clogged the memory bottleneck until sufficient caches were added to the RISC processors. In some sense, you could view the caches on RISC processors as the microcode store in a CISC processor. Both reduced the overall appetite for instructions that were loaded from memory.