Re: Why VAX Was the Ultimate CISC and Not RISC

On Sun, 02 Mar 2025 09:34:37 GMT, Anton Ertl wrote:

mitchalsup@aol.com (MitchAlsup1) writes:
 

A pipelined machine in 1978 would have had 50% to 100% more circuit
boards than VAX 11/780, making it a lot more expensive.

 
What makes you think that a pipelined single-issue RV32GC would take
more circuit boards than VAX11/780?  I have no data about discrete
implementations, but if we look at integrated ones and assume that the
number of transistors or the area corresponds to the number of circuit
boards in discrete implementations, the evidence goes in the opposite
direction:

You could look at the MIT Lisp Machine, it used basically the same chips
as a VAX 11/780 but was a pipelined load/store architecture internally.