Re: Instruction Tracing

It appears that Lawrence D'Oliveiro  <ldo@nz.invalid> said:

(ROMP was also one of those RISC architectures that had delayed branches,
along with MIPS, HP-PA and I think SPARC as well.)
>
I have heard it said that the RT PC was a poor advertisement for the
benefits of RISC, and the joke was made that “RT” stood for “Reduced
Technology”.

I worked on AIX for the RT/PC. It was a pretty reasonable chip for the
time, but it suffered greatly from internal IBM political fights which
made it too little too late. AIX ran on top of a bloated virtual
machine which made the whole thing too slow. There was skunkworks port
of BSD that was supposed to be a lot better.

As far as the delayed branches and such, they made sense in the narrow
time window when it was too expensive to put a cache on a workstation
but that time came and went by the time the RT shipped.
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