[Gllug] The importance of the PC to free software (was Barbican website...)

[Tethys]

Pete Ryland writes:

>> Quite so. GCC still shows its architectural heritage as a compiler for
>> CISC chips (m68k and SPARC).
>
>I guess you mean RISC.

It all depends on definitions. Commonly, the m68k is called a CISC chip,
and SPARC is called RISC. But it all depends on how you define RISC and
CISC. There's no hard and fast line which once crossed puts you in one
camp or another. Just a set of vague properties, some of which may be
true for any given chip. For example, SPARC has a fixed instruction
width, and lack of addressing modes common among RISC chips, while
m68k has the opposite. But even then, the line get blurred. The 68040,
for example, has been described as a RISC implementation of a CISC
architecture.

Tet (who still yearns for the good old days of 6502/6510)

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