WAY OFF TOPIC: RISC v/s CISC CPUs for music

[Don Tillman]

   From: dave.halliday at greymatter.com (Dave Halliday)
   Date: Tue, 27 Oct 1998 05:42:36 GMT

   There is no real way to compare the two chip designs.  The Reduced 
   Instruction Set Computer ( RISC ) does some things much better than 
   the Complex I. S. C.  ( CISC ) chips. And it does some things much worse.

   Literally, apples ( note the small " a " ) and oranges...

The Pentium is not a very good example of a CISC architecture.  Yes
it's CISC (though internally there's some RISC also) but that's only a
side effect of it being descended from the 4004/8008 4- and 8-bit
microprocessors, which was the primary goal of the architecture.
Being able to have the chip go through a handful of product
generations with roughly the same instruction set (4004, 8008, 8080,
8085, 8086, 8088 back in 1980) was very likely the major selling point
for IBM when they were shopping for a chip for their PC.  After all,
IBM was famous for exactly that.

The VAX is a good example of CISC architecture.

But if you're choosing a computer for music work, none of this matters
at all!

  -- Don