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Re: Architecture / Instruction Set / Language co-design.

Cross-posted to 3 groups.

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On 7/18/11 5:26 PM, Mark Thorson wrote:
> It could be argued that the National Semiconductor NS16032 (later
> renamed NS32016) qualifies.  The designers Les Kohn and Dan O'Dowd
> started with an instruction set more-or-less based on the VAX and
> pared it down to what they considered a minimum.  Dan wrote a Pascal
> compiler that guided the design of the architecture in the sense that
> every time the chip designers in Israel asked whether they could
> delete a feature Les would turn to Dan and ask how that would affect
> the compiler.  That chip was intended to be a general-purpose
> architecture, but the compiler guided decisions on what features were
> important.
>
> Four instructions were deleted relatively late in the design process,
> and you can see the places where they would have been if you look at
> any early 32000 family die.  There are four clear stripes that span
> the microcode ROM.  I believe these are visible on all 32000 family
> devices through the NS32332.  If I remember correctly, the CPU was
> reimplemented in the NS32532, at which point the stripes disappeared.
>
> [Too bad they didn't have time to debug the chip before they shipped
> it.  The NS chips, at least the early ones, were so buggy as to be
> almost unusable. -John]

Yes, I was very interested in the instruction descriptions for the
NS32016.  Seems it had a "CASE" assembly language instruction.
But I heard that the chip had hardware problems that were *never*
worked out...  Too bad.

--
+----------------------------------------+
|     Charles and Francis Richmond       |
|                                        |
|  plano dot net at aquaporin4 dot com   |
+----------------------------------------+

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Re: Architecture / Instruction Set / Language co-design. Mark Thorson <nospam@sonic.net> - 2011-07-18 14:26 -0800
  Re: Architecture / Instruction Set / Language co-design. Charles Richmond <plano.net@aquaporin4.com> - 2011-07-20 01:10 -0500

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