Re: Why VAX Was the Ultimate CISC and Not RISC

On Mon, 3 Mar 2025 02:58:41 -0000 (UTC), John Levine wrote:

Nearly all opcodes were one byte other than the extended format floating
point instructions so it's hard to see how they could have made that
much smaller without making it a lot more complicated.

Bell points that VAX code gets close to the code density of equivalent
PDP-11 code. That was a major design goal.