15 Apr
1998
15 Apr
'98
9:08 p.m.
On Apr 14, 23:53, Allison J Parent wrote:
<What do people here on the list think of the
flexibility and
<generality of the PDP-11's addressing modes? Is this a well thought
<out architecture in your view? How are the PDP-11's addressing modes
<better or worse than those of other processors, past and present?
Personally I consider it a high point in 16 bit computing and one that
is a standard of comparison. VAX carried this to the 32bit realm. I
know of few 16 bit microprocessors that are as capable as the PDP-11
and as fast (the ti9900 was good but slow, Z8000 was close).
Don't forget the 68000. Motorola deliberately adopted a lot of similar design
features for the 68K; there's a very interesting design paper still available
called "Design Philosophy Behind Motorola's 68000", publication no.AR208.
The
same sort of instruction/address-mode orthogonality as found in the PDP11, is
one of the big features.
Terrible cpu, we should junk them all... ;-) ...so I
can collect them.
All right, providing I can have the ones on this side of the Atlantic...
--
Pete Peter Turnbull
Dept. of Computer Science
University of York
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