Is there any merit to non-x86 CISC architectures?

Well RISC is still currently the best way to hack Gibsons, so no.

We need somebody to clone the VAX and make a SOC integrating the CPU and common peripherals. The software is already there.

Yes, someone with enough knowhow from this board should do it.
We can collaborate after the initial architecture is drawn up.
If budget is a problem, we can ask our moms for initial investment capital. What do you say??

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I’d say that I can tell you’re Jewish. Much of the work is already done if you surf on over to opencores.

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IBM made their own chips though.

RISC came about because UNIX weenies can't make a complex chip run fast or a compiler that can use those instructions. CISC was coined by RISC weenies to mean anything that's not RISC. Lisp machines are CISC, which makes them bad. Mainframes are CISC, which makes them bad. When you get rid of all the buzzwords and weenie bullshit, "complex" means any instruction that's not used by C compilers.

There's a lot of merit to Lisp machines. There's a lot of merit to more conventional CISCs too.

people.eecs.berkeley.edu/~kubitron/cs252/handouts/papers/symbolics.pdf

"RISC is to hardware what the UNIX operating system [sic] is to software." Subject: Wait, I thought RISC was a *good* idea No, the quote is exactly right. RISC is a lazy solutionalong the lines of "well, we don't know how to writecompilers that use complex instructions efficiently, and wedon't know how to design complex hardware that runs fast, sowe'll make everything simple, and we can advertise we run at80Mhz even though the system supports fewer user than a 1MIP DEC-20." It's exactly analagous to "you can use pipes andredirection shell scripts to do anything, so we don't haveto write any REAL programs" and "portability is moreimportant that usability" philosophies so rampant in theunix world.(Was I properly vitrolic this time?)

Wow that's annoying.

Is VLIW bad too?

Before getting a PC, I had an Amiga, and before that an Amstrad CPC. Both were a lot nicer than x86 when it comes down to it. Doing DOS and Turbo Pascal on the 486 was still okay, but recent hardware is just no fun for me. I'm just not at all into modern games and web.

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Meanwhile the Unix approach really was better in the long term, with x86 becoming RISC internally and Microsoft cramming more and more Unix/Linuxisms into Windows.

Bad according to the weenies or bad according to me? I think VLIWs are mostly bad because they have the same problems as RISC but worse. Itanium was also optimized for C and UNIX.

Subject: Hating Unix Means Hating Risc Date: Fri, 22 Mar 91 21:34:47 EST From: JW Hey. This is unix-haters, not RISC-haters. Look, those guys at berkeley decided to optimise theirchip for C and Unix programs. It says so right in theirpaper. They looked at how C programs tended to behave, and(later) how Unix behaved, and made a chip that worked thatway. So what if it's hard to make downward lexical funargswhen you have register windows? It's a special-purposechip, remember? Only then companies like Sun push their snazzy RISCmachines. To make their machines more attractive theyproudly point out "and of course it uses the greatgeneral-purpose RISC. Why it's so general purpose that itruns Unix and C just great!" This, I suppose, is a variation on the usual "the wayit's done in unix is by definition the general case"disease.

VLIW is basically only for DSPs nowadays. The Mill CPU guys could make one capable of running C and Linux effectively if they ever start shipping silicon.

I think they were snatched up by the defense industry.

Read another book already.
Something about Forth for example.