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

[Pete Ryland]

On Mon, Nov 18, 2002 at 09:59:21AM +0000, Adam Bower wrote:
> Pete Ryland wrote:
> >On Sun, Nov 17, 2002 at 12:54:18PM +0000, Nix wrote:
> >>Quite so. GCC still shows its architectural heritage as a compiler for
> >>CISC chips (m68k and SPARC).
> >
> >I guess you mean RISC.
> 
> But the m68k is a CISC chip and the SPARC is a RISC chip...

What makes you think m68k is CISC?

It has lots of general-purpose registers (8 data & 8 address iirc, or is it
16 - it's been a while, although I do remember that even the stack pointer
is a general-purpose address register!), and all the instructions are
constant-length (again, afair).  Granted it has always had a multiply
instruction, but it doesn't have cmpxchg8b, or xlat, or rep stosb
instructions, like our favourite CISC processors do!

Pete

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