Processor design: Difference between revisions

Revision as of 06:20, 6 October 2005

Revision as of 01:04, 12 October 2005

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In many CISCs, an instruction could access either registers or memory, usually in several different ways.

This made the CISCs easier to program, because a programmer could remember just thirty to a hundred instructions, and a set of three to ten [[addressing mode]]s rather than thousands of distinct instructions.

This was called an "[[orthogonal instruction set]]."

The [[PDP-11]] and [[Motorola 68000]] architecture are examples of nearly orthogonal instruction sets.