Re: Why VAX Was the Ultimate CISC and Not RISC

Stefan Monnier <monnier@iro.umontreal.ca> schrieb:

Anton Ertl [2025-03-01 11:58:17] wrote:

Bottom line: If you sent, e.g., me and the needed documents back in
time to the start of the VAX project, and gave me a magic wand that
would convince the DEC management and workforce that I know how to
design their next architecture, and how to compiler for it, I would
give the implementation team RV32GC as architecture to implement, and
that they should use pipelining for that, and of course also give that
to the software people.

>
I wonder if an RV32GC would be competitive if implemented in the
technology available back in 1977 (when the VAX-11/780 came out,
according to Wikipedia).

RISC in general could have been - the 801 (although it was
implemented in ECL), HP's first HP-PA, implemented in TTL,  and
ARM show that.