Damned open source zelot....
-1 Flamebait

Wetzel
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A short history on RISC vs CISC is forthcomming.

/me awaits impatiently...

:D

I take that as a complement.

I know exactly what I'm talking about. The new Intel and AMD processors are a hybrid of risc and cisc. They take a larger instruction set and break it down into smaller sets of instructions. Not as far as a risc chip, but they do. That's why pc processors have become so fast lately.

And by pc processors, I mean IBM compatabile. Macs are with Motorola processors, PC's are made with Intel and AMD processors.

I have never heard RISC ever in my life. I am not saying your wrong, but I never seen it.

Anyways, Pro Users turn to Macintosh not really for its hardware, but its software. Apple uses Color Sync, which displays a better color than a Microsoft Windows pallete. Macs also use Quartz, Open GL, PDF, etc. that make creative pro users flock to the mac than to the PC. There are a bunch of other reasons that creative users choose Macintosh, but I won't get into that.

How fast a computer goes depends on several factors, both in software and in hardware.
Mhz, or the yield, is really kind of a stupid way to measure power in a computer. Because Mhz is really like the RPM meter in your car, it doesn't tell you how fast your going, it just tells you how fast the pistons are revolving. There are so many ways you can measure speed for a processor (MHz, Gigaflops, and some company invent their own way of measuring speed, like AMD). But the most accurate test is a fair benchmark test.
In hardware you can't say "What is the fastest thing in my computer," but you have to ask yourself "What is the slowest thing in my computer" because that limiting factor really determines what your actual speed is going to be. For example say you have the latest and greatest P4 2.5 Ghz, but you have 133 mhz SD-RAM, the end result will be that you can only harvest about 1.33 Ghz of that power. There are so many other things that can hinder performance too.

The top 7 reasons that I have noticed that Macs are not common in the business field are:

1. LAN administrators will criticize you if you try to put a Mac on a Windows Network.

2. Companies try to cut cost by only offering service and support to Wintel Machines.

3. Business don't want to buy 2 licensees for the same product.

4. Companies want everything standardized computers so they can get tech support from one company.

5. The high initial cost of Macs, sometimes deters them from buying it.

6. There is a specific piece of software that everyone has to run, and its not Mac

7. Most business usually use computers for applications like Office, databases, the internet, e-mail, and other simple tasks that PCs can do as well as Macs

RISC is Reduced Instruction Set Computer
CISC is Complete Instruction Set Computer

It has to do with how many instructions the processor has, how specific/abstract they are, etc.

Stephen

Ok, before Weztel can get to it, RISC is reduced instruction set computing, or something along those lines, and CISC is complex instruction set computing.

The difference is that a risc processor can only do simple calculations. Like addition, subtraction.... stuff like that. When the computer code is compiled, the compiler translates the code the programmer wrote into code that's very simple. This allows the processor to be smaller and less complex, and it also doesn't take as long because it doesn't have to choose from as many instructions as a CISC processor. The downside, you have to put the processor through more clock cycles to do a problem. But because it takes less time to run through one clock cycle, it makes up for it.

CISC processors take a problem and crunch the entire thing. Because of this, a CISC processor has a large number of instruction sets to choose from, and takes more time per clock cycle. But, when it decides what to do with it, it can crunch the entire thing at once, instead of little pieces.

So who uses what processors? Mac's use RISC, and PC's use CISC. Sun Systems also use RISC processors, and run Sun's version of Unix. (I also add that they are faster then both Mac's and PC's)

In the end, RISC is faster. But as I've said already, Intel and AMD processors are no longer pure CISC chips.

Actually you don't...

Quote:

The new Intel and AMD processors are a hybrid of risc and cisc. They take a larger instruction set and break it down into smaller sets of instructions. Not as far as a risc chip, but they do. That's why pc processors have become so fast lately.

Processors do not break down instructions. They fetch instructions from memory and operate on them. That's all they do. It's up to the compiler to break down code into instructions the processor understands. The speed limitation of the chip isn't directly related to its instruction set, it's more of a physical boundry. The problem with older CISC processors was that some of the operations took a long time & stalled the pipeline (clock ticks but no instructions get processed). It doesn't slow down the chip, it slows down the execution of the code. Processor designers have found ways around stalling that I'm not really familiar with.

If you want more info about processor design, go to U of IL and take ECE312 :)

I know I posted on here a while back about processor speed, instruction set, etc, but I can't find it :(

Small inaccuracy. Many (most?) CISC instructions take more than one clock cycle to complete. So you're right to say that it takes more time, but not more time per cycle, just more cycles.

Mike

This is somewhat correct.

RISC stands for Reduced Instruction Set Computer. RISC architecture is desinged around the idea that large numbers of smaller instructions are faster to execute than a single large instruction.
The first PC CPU's were CISC(Complex Instruction Set Computer) chips, because all the instructions the processor could execute were built into the chip. This saved memory back in the days when memory was really expensive. To improve CISC chips, new commands were added. With each new command, the programming changed. RISC chips were designed as an alternative to the growing complexity of the CISC chips. RISC turned out to work better.

Quote:

With the newer Intel and AMD chips, they are now breaking down really complex instructions into smaller instructions in a similar fashion. They are not pure risc chips, but they are a hybrid.

AMD and Intel have had RISC cores since the K5 and Pentium Pro, but with a CISC interepreter.
Windows, both NT and 9x, were built for CISC chips. This has prevented true RISC chips for the pc, because Windows will not run on a RISC chip.

However, "PC processors are becoming more and more risc, that's why Intel and AMD processors have been able to reach such high speeds so fast. " is incorrect and shows a lack of understanding of current CPU developments. The reason that the processors are increasingin speed is because AMD and Intel are adding more and more transistors to their chips. Higher clock speeds mean more calculations per second and more brute power. Here is where Intel and AMD diverge on chip design. Intel is spending their effort seeing how much raw power they can get, while AMD is spending most of their effort refining thier power and making their chips more efficent.

Quote:

And trust me, if we wanted to run the software that we run on a PC on a mac, we could. Most everything we run is in Java, and can be run on anything from our AS/400's to our macs.

What you say? Most everything I run is not Java, nor are most business apps(office) are not Java.

Quote:

But mac's are too expensive and too difficult to customize the way you can Linux or Windows to be practical in a buisness enviroment. For the same, if not faster, speed, you can pay 1/4 to a 1/2 for a pc of what you would pay for a mac.

For most buisness applications, a K6-500 is plenty of speed. Most buisness applications are email, spreadsheets, databases, the internet - things that don't need high power. Nor do things need to be highly configured.

Quote:

There are plenty of choices besides Windows 2000 and XP. There are countless dist. of Linux, Unix, BEos, bsd's.... and most of them arn't very hard to learn, espically the newer releases of Linux. Out of all of them, I perfer Win2k. It's fast, stable, and highly configurable. I also run Xp and Redhat occassionally. They all have their own uses.

I also prefer Win2k. Asto other OS's, you have the fact that Microsoft is already entrenched in the workplace. People know how to use it. They don't like change, especially now with all the uncertanty with major corporations droping left and right now.


Wetzel
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Wanna chat further Weffs11 on AIM or goto tigerbolt.
/me is listening to E:\Tom Jones\Tom Jones - She's A Lady (bt Remix).mp3

MACs
 

At my job, MACs are used all over the place. Because I work in a design studio, one of the major things we produce are sketches for our customers and/or designers. The majority of these are done on Macs because they do have the better graphics...as far as the second dimension. I don't even know of any 3d modeling programs for Macs, but of course there are a multitude of these for PCs(Rhino, MAYA, Alias, I could go on and on) and Unix(CATIA, Unigraphics, IDEAS).

I don't really know if macs are entirely necessary for the design world, as most of the things done on them can also be done on PCs(probably less pretty, though), but there is no way our studio could survive without PCs.

Ok, well most of the buisness apps we use at my job are Java based. We access our AS/400's throgh telnet sessions, we use JD Edwards, which runs as java both on the AS/400 and on the workstation, we use another application that tracks some shipping stuff, all in java. Pretty much the only applications we use that isn't java is office.

As for processors breaking down instructions, AMD and Intil processors do break them down. They are fed CISC instructions, and the processors break them down.

Re: MACs
 

Maya is avaiable for the mac, plus a way aray of other 3d moldeling software. Just check on any site like Creation Engine for mac os x products.

Also, thanks for explaining RICS and CICS.

Not that I tried to stop it or anything, but I knew this was just going to break down into a few people flaming eachother...

Just FYI...

This thread is really getting old......