Yes, The CISC (Complex Instruction Set Computer) designs like the x86
needed lots of chip real estate just for the microcode ROM.
The microcode used close to 1/5 -1/4 of the chip. You can see it if you
google 8086 images. The instruction execution times vary
widely depending on the number of microcycles needed.
Darren New wrote:
Gabriel Sechan wrote:
128 was overkill, but 6 is annoyingly small.
For those who don't know the history, the (or at least one) original
point behind RISC was to reduce instruction processing to leave more
room on the chip for registers. The first RISC chip had 256 registers,
IIRC. That's why you really needed a compiler to get decent performance.
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