Subject:
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Re: mindstorms NXT and memory
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Newsgroups:
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lugnet.robotics
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Date:
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Tue, 10 Jan 2006 16:42:58 GMT
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Viewed:
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10350 times
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In lugnet.robotics, Alexander Sack wrote:
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In lugnet.robotics, Kevin L. Clague wrote:
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In lugnet.robotics, Alexander Sack wrote:
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In lugnet.robotics, Jordan Bradford wrote:
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I said that RISC machines (in general) are harder to program in
machine code. The ARM is as easy as any other processor to program
in high level languages.
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Do you mean machine code (binary) or assembly language?
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There the same.
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Obviously you’ve not coded in machine language, or you’d know they are not.
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If you are talking about the actual 1’s and 0’s that represent machine code
then you are correct and I misinterpreted your last post, i.e. the binary.
When people speak of binaries they are usually referring to something like an
executable binary such as ELF or COFF. I saw “high-level language” and short
circuited.
Yes, I have never coded at the machine code level and pray I never have too.
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Now you’re talkin! I’ve never really done more than a half dozen instructions,
unless it was a homework problem waaaaaaaay (and I really mean waaaaaaaay ;^)
back in college.
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I first learned
assembly language programming on a MIPS chip (RISC). I’ve also done it on
a Motorola 68HC11 (a microcontroller), and I’ve written both pure machine
code and assembly language for the Intel 8086. I much prefer the MIPS
processor, followed by the 68HC11, and dead last is any Intel x86 chip.
Bleah.
For machine code, pretty much any chip is “hard” to program.
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I guess my last post didn’t make it.
Fundamentally, Steve is correct that RISC is typically more complex to
program since it uses less general purpose registers and more complex
instructions (it tries to do more per clock tic than CISC).
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You misunderstand RISC and CISC. CISC instructions often combine data
memory references with arithmetic, logical, or brach capabilities. RISC
machines do not. RISC instructions try to do *less* per clock tick, thus
the instructions take less logic, and can run *faster*.
Typically RISC instructions are simpler than CISC instructions. Often RISC
architectures separate memory related instructions from arithemtic, logical,
branch or other miscelaneous instructions. RISC machines typically have
many more registers than a CISC machine. The SPARC machines that Sun makes
(RISC) gives you 31 general purpose registers which can be used for address
or data. Compare this with the 68000 CISC where you get 8 address and 8
data.
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Yup I switched them. My bad, that’s correct. RISC needs to have more
general purpose registers to make up for the lack of complex instruction
types on CISC. Thanks for the review.
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I guess this is what CISC proponents say. I don’t know that I agree. I think
that no matter the architecture type *more* is better! Register access is
orders of magnitudes faster than memory access, so less memory access are
better.
Register access time halves every two years, yet DRAM access times halve every
six years. Memory is painfully slow these days.... but now I’m *really* off
topic!
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The reason that folks think RISC is more complex to program is that it
typically takes a few RISC instructios to emulate a CISC instruction. I
don’t find it more or less difficult, just different. I’ve done assembly on
8080, 8085, 8086, 80286, IMB 360, IBM370, IBM 390, 6502, 6800, 6811,
68000(all CISC), as well as SPARC, and soon to be ARM7 (RISC). I find the
orthoginality of RISC instruction sets much nicer than the redundancy of
CISC machines. Having worked on simulation of future CISC and RISC products
from the gates up, I find RISC a much better machine design.
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I think its all personal preference at this point. Like I said, the lines
between RISC and CISC are much less than they use to be.
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I think that the fact that X86 has effectively gone RISC indicates that RISC is
winning the conceptual battle. You trade a little bit of programming effort
spread across a lot of programmers, for the ability to toss out a lot of
hardware complexity and the engineering cost that it takes to make sure the
complexity is really working.
Sun’s most recent hardware announcement was for a four stage instruction
pipeline that chip vs chip dramatically outperforms anything Intel (3X) has
(with their 20+ stage pipeline). Now that we’re this far off topic, maybe we
need to move this thread ;^)
It is fun to discuss, but doesn’t really have much to do with NXT so I’ll sit
down and be quiet.
Kev
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Message has 1 Reply:
 | | Re: mindstorms NXT and memory
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| (...) I totally agree! I stated this in another thread (or maybe this one) that assembly code on Intel is like Java Byte Code (but worse). I mean its not like you *really* know as a "high-level assembly programmer" exactly the order in which (...) (19 years ago, 10-Jan-06, to lugnet.robotics, FTX)
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Message is in Reply To:
| | Re: mindstorms NXT and memory
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| (...) If you are talking about the actual 1's and 0's that represent machine code then you are correct and I misinterpreted your last post, i.e. the binary. When people speak of binaries they are usually referring to something like an executable (...) (19 years ago, 10-Jan-06, to lugnet.robotics, FTX)
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