Re: is Vax addressing sane today

On Sun, 22 Sep 2024 02:26:33 +0000, MitchAlsup1 wrote:

It is faster if for no other reason that it did not fetch the branch
that is always predicted non-taken.

But architectures like POWER were able to do that sort of thing in zero
effective cycles, decades ago.

If every calculation instruction had to be followed by a conditional
branch, then the code would be 150% its original size (or worse).

Not every one. There are ways to do the checks only at crucial points,
after sequences of instructions. This is how IEEE754 “exceptions” work,
for example.