2 RISC design philosophy

In the late 1970s research at IBMThis article is about the International Business Machines Corporation; see IBM (disambiguation) for other uses of this abbreviation. International Business Machines Corporation IBM or colloquially, Big Blue (incorporated June 15, 1911, in operation since (and similar projects elsewhere) demonstrated that the majority of these "orthogonal" addressing modeIn computer programming, addressing mode s are primarily of interest to compiler writers and to those (few nowadays) who use assembly language. Some computer science students may also need to learn about addressing modes as part of their studies. Those ins were ignored by most programs. This was a side effect of the increasing use of compilers to generate the programs, as opposed to writing them in assembly language. The compilers in use at the time only had a limited ability to take advantage of the features provided by CISC CPUs; this was largely a result of the difficulty of writing a compiler. The market was clearly moving to even wider use of compilers, diluting the usefulness of these orthogonal modes even more.

Another discovery was that since these operations were rarely used, in fact they tended to be slower than a number of smaller operations doing the same thing. This seeming paradox was a side effect of the time spent designing the CPUs, designers simply didn't have time to tune every possible instruction, and instead tuned only the most used ones. One famous example of this was the VAX's INDEX instruction, which ran slower than a loop implementing the same code.

At about the same time, CPUs started to run even faster than the memory they talked to. Even in the late 1970s it was apparent that this disparity was going to continue to grow for at least the next decade, by which time the CPU would be tens to hundreds of times faster than the memory. It became apparent that more registers (and later caches) would be needed to support these higher operating frequencies. These additional registers and cache memories would require sizeable chip or board areas that could be made available if the complexity of the CPU was reduced.

Yet another part of RISC design came from practical measurements on real-world programs. Andrew Tanenbaum summed up many of these, demonstrating that most processors were vastly overdesigned. For instance, he showed that 98% of all the constants in a program would fit in 13 bits, yet almost every CPU design dedicated some multiple of 8 bits to storing them, typically 8, 16 or 32, one entire word. Taking this fact into account suggests that a machine should allow for constants to be stored in unused bits of the instruction itself, decreasing the number of memory accesses. Instead of loading up numbers from memory or registers, they would be "right there" when the CPU needed them, and therefore much faster. However this required the instruction itself to be very small, otherwise there wouldn't be enough room left over in the 32-bits to hold reasonably sized constants.

It was the small number of addressing modes and commands that resulted in the term Reduced Instruction Set. This is not an accurate terminology, as RISC designs often have huge command sets of their own. The real difference is the philosophy of doing everything in registers and loading and saving the data to and from them. This is why the design is more properly referred to as load-store. Over time the older design technique became known as Complex Instruction Set Computer, or CISC, although this was largely to give them a different name for comparison purposes.

Thus the RISC philosophy was to make smaller instructions, implying fewer of them, and thus the name "reduced instruction set". Code was implemented as a series of these simple instructions, instead of a single complex instruction that had the same result. This had the side effect of leaving more room in the instruction to carry data with it, meaning that there was less need to use registers or memory. At the same time the memory interface was considerably simpler, allowing it to be tuned.

However RISC also had its drawbacks. Since a series of instructions is needed to complete even simple tasks, the total number of instructions read from memory is larger, and therefore takes longer. At the time it was not clear whether or not there would be a net gain in performance due to this limitation, and there was an almost continual battle in the press and design world about the RISC concepts.

3 Meanwhile...

While the RISC philosophy was coming into its own, new ideas about how to dramatically increase performance of the CPUs were starting to develop.

In the early 1980s it was thought that existing design was reaching theoretical limits. Future improvements in speed would be primarily through improved "process", that is, smaller features on the chip. The complexity of the chip would remain largely the same, but the smaller size would allow it to run at higher clock rates. A considerable amount of effort was put into designing chips for parallel computing, with built-in communications links. Instead of making faster chips, a large number of chips would be used, dividing up problems among them. However history has shown that the original fears were not valid, and there were a number of ideas that dramatically improved performance in the late 1980s.

One idea was to include a pipeline which would break down instructions into steps, and work on one step of several different instructions at the same time. A normal processor might read an instruction, decode it, fetch the memory the instruction asked for, perform the operation, and then write the results back out. The key to pipelining is the observation that the processor can start reading the next instruction as soon as it finishes reading the last, meaning that there are now two instructions being worked on (one is being read, the next is being decoded), and after another cycle there will be three. While no single instruction is completed any faster, the next instruction would complete right after the previous one. The illusion was of a much faster system, and more efficient utilization of processor resources.

Yet another solution was to use several processing elements inside the processor and run them in parallel. Instead of working on one instruction to add two numbers, these superscalar processors would look at the next instruction in the pipeline and attempt to run it at the same time in an identical unit. This is not a very easy thing to do however, as many instructions in computing depend on the results of some other instruction.

Both of these techniques relied on increasing speed by adding complexity to the basic layout of the CPU, as opposed to the instructions running on them. With chip space being a finite quantity, in order to include these features something else would have to be removed to make room. RISC was tailor-made to take advantage of these techniques, because the core logic of a RISC CPU was considerably simpler than in CISC designs. Although the first RISC designs had marginal performance, they were able to quickly add these new design features and by the late 1980s they were significantly outperforming their CISC counterparts. In time this would be addressed as process improved to the point where all of this could be added to a CISC design and still fit on a single chip, but this took most of the late-80s and early 90s.

The long and short of it is that for any given level of general performance, a RISC chip will typically have many fewer transistors dedicated to the core logic. This allows the designers considerable flexibility; they can, for instance:

• increase the size of the register set
• implement measures to increase internal parallelism
• add huge caches
• add other functionality, like I/O and timers for microcontrollers
• add vector ( SIMD) processors like AltiVec
• build the chips on older lines, which would otherwise go unused
• do nothing; offer the chip for low-power or size-limited applications

Features which are generally found in RISC designs are

• uniform instruction encoding (e.g. the op-code is always in the same bit positions in each instruction, which is always one word long), which allows faster decoding;
• a homogenous register set, allowing any register to be used in any context and simplifying compiler design (although there are almost always separate integer and floating point register files);
• simple addressing modes (complex addressing modes are replaced by sequences of simple arithmetic instructions);
• few data types supported in hardware (for example, some CISC machines had instructions for dealing with byte strings. Others had support for polynomials and complex numbers. Such instructions are unlikely to be found on a RISC machine).

RISC designs are also more likely to feature a Harvard memory model, where the instruction stream and the data stream are conceptually separated; this means that modifying the addresses where code is held might not have any effect on the instructions executed by the processor (because the CPU has a separate instruction and data cache), at least until a special synchronization instruction is issued. On the upside, this allows both caches to be accessed simultaneously, which can often improve performance.

Many of these early RISC designs also shared a not-so-nice feature, the branch delay slot. A branch delay slot is an instruction space immediately following a jump or branch. The instruction in this space is executed whether or not the branch is taken (in other words the effect of the branch is delayed). This instruction keeps the ALU of the CPU busy for the extra time normally needed to perform a branch. Nowadays the branch delay slot is considered an unfortunate side effect of a particular strategy for implementing some RISC designs, and modern RISC designs generally do away with it (such as PowerPC, more recent versions of SPARC, and MIPS).

4 Early RISC

The first system that would today be known as RISC wasn't at the time; it was the CDC 6600 supercomputer, designed in 1964 by Seymour Cray. Cray designed it as a number-crunching CPU (with 74 op-codes, compared with a 8086's 400) plus 12 simple computers to handle I/O (most of the operating system was in one of these). The CDC 6600 had a load/store architecture with only two addressing modes. There were eleven pipelined functional units for arithmetic and logic, plus five load units and two store units (the memory had multiple banks so all load/store units could operate at the same time). The basic clock cycle/instruction issue rate was 10 times faster than the memory access time.

Another early load/store machine was the Data General Nova minicomputer, designed in 1968.

The most public RISC designs, however, were the results of university research programs run with funding from the DARPA VLSI Program . The VLSI Program, practically unknown today, led to a huge number of advances in chip design, fabrication, and even computer graphics.

UC Berkeley's RISC project started in 1980 under the direction of David Patterson, based on gaining performance through the use of pipelining and an aggressive use of registers known as register windows. In a normal CPU you have a small number of registers, and a program can use any register at any time. In a CPU with register windows, there are a huge number of registers, 128, but programs can only use a small number of them, 8, at any one time.

A program that limits itself to 8 registers per procedure can make very fast procedure calls: The call, and the return, simply move the window to the set of 8 registers used by that procedure. (On a normal CPU, most calls "flush" the contents of the registers to RAM to clear enough working space for the subroutine, and the return "restores" those values).

The RISC project delivered the RISC-I processor in 1982. Consisting of only 44,420 transistors (compared with averages of about 100,000 in newer CISC designs of the era) RISC-I had only 32 instructions, and yet completely outperformed any other single-chip design. They followed this up with the 40,760 transistor, 39 instruction RISC-II in 1983, which ran over three times as fast as RISC-I.

At about the same time, John Hennessy started a similar project called MIPS at Stanford University in 1981. MIPS focussed almost entirely on the pipeline, making sure it could be run as "full" as possible. Although pipelining was already in use in other designs, several features of the MIPS chip made its pipeline far faster. The most important, and perhaps annoying, of these features was the demand that all instructions be able to complete in one cycle. This demand allowed the pipeline to be run at much higher speeds (there was no need for induced delays) and is responsible for much of the processor's speed. However, it also had the negative side effect of eliminating many potentially useful instructions, like a multiply or a divide.

The earliest attempt to make a chip-based RISC CPU was a project at IBM which started in 1975, predating both of the projects above. Named after the building where the project ran, the work led to the IBM 801 CPU family which was used widely inside IBM hardware. The 801 was eventually produced in a single-chip form as the ROMP in 1981, which stood for Research (Office Products Division) Mini Processor. As the name implies, this CPU was designed for "mini" tasks, and when IBM released the IBM RT-PC based on the design in 1986, the performance was not acceptable. Nevertheless the 801 inspired several research projects, including new ones at IBM that would eventually lead to their POWER system.

In the early years, the RISC efforts were well known, but largely confined to the university labs that had created them. The Berkeley effort became so well known that it eventually became the name for the entire concept. Many in the computer industry criticized that the performance benefits were unlikely to translate into real-world settings due to the decreased memory efficiency of multiple instructions, and that that was the reason no one was using them. But starting in 1986, all of the RISC research projects started delivering products. In fact, almost all modern RISC processors are direct copies of the RISC-II design.

5 Modern RISC

Berkeley's research was not directly commercialized, but the RISC-II design was used by Sun Microsystems to develop the SPARC, by Pyramid Technology to develop their line of mid-range multi-processor machines, and by almost every other company a few years later. It was Sun's use of a RISC chip in their new machines that demonstrated that RISC's benefits were real, and their machines quickly outpaced the competition and essentially took over the entire workstation market.

John Hennessy left Stanford to commercialize the MIPS design, starting the company known as MIPS Computer Systems Their first design was a second-generation MIPS chip known as the R2000. MIPS designs went on to become one of the most used RISC chips when they were included in the Nintendo game consoles. Today they are one of the most common embedded processor s in use for high-end applications.

IBM learned from the RT-PC failure and would go on to design the RS/6000 based on their new POWER architecture. They then moved their existing S/370 mainframes to POWER chips, and found much to their surprise that even the very complex instruction set (dating to the S/360 from 1964) ran considerably faster. The result was the new System/390 series which continues to be sold today as the zSeries. POWER would also find itself moving "down" in scale to produce the PowerPC design, which eliminated many of the "IBM only" instructions and created a single-chip implementation. Today the PowerPC is used in all Apple Macintosh machines, as well as being one of the most commonly used CPUs for automotive applications (some cars have over 10 of them inside).

Almost all other vendors quickly joined. From the UK similar research efforts resulted in the INMOS Transputer, the Acorn Archimedes and the Advanced RISC Machine line, which is a huge success today. Companies with existing CISC designs also quickly joined the revolution. Intel released the i860 and i960 by the late 1980s, although they were not very successful. Motorola built a new design called the 88000 in homage to their famed CISC 68000, but it saw almost no use and they eventually abandoned it and joined IBM to produce the PowerPC. AMD released their 29000 which would go on to become the most popular RISC design in the early 1990s.

Today RISC CPUs (and microcontrollers) represent the vast majority of all CPUs in use. The RISC design technique offers power in even small sizes, and thus has come to completely dominate the market for low-power "embedded" CPUs. Embedded CPUs are by far the most common market for processors: consider that a family with one or two PCs may own several dozen devices with embedded processors. RISC had also completely taken over the market for larger workstations for much of the 90s. After the release of the Sun SPARCstation the other vendors rushed to compete with RISC based solutions of their own. Even the mainframe world is now completely RISC based.

However, despite many successes, RISC has made few inroads into the desktop PC and commodity server markets, where Intel's x86 platform remains the dominant processor architecture ( Intel is facing increased competition from AMD, but even AMD's processors implement the x86 platform, or a 64-bit superset known as x86-64). There are three main reasons for this. One, the x86 had a very large base of applications, whereas no RISC platform could claim the same, and this allowed x86 chip-makers to enjoy continuous sales despite a lack of performance. The second is that, although RISC was indeed able to scale up in performance quite quickly and cheaply, Intel countered by spending enormous amounts of money on processor development. For example, if it costs ten times as much to design a x86 chip with twice the performance of a competing RISC CPU, then no matter, Intel has ten times the cash and proceeds to do it. In reality Intel has even more than that, and Intel's CPUs continue to make great (and to many, surprising) strides in performance and more recently so have AMD's CPUs. The third reason is that Intel designers realized that RISC is a set of design philosophies and practices instead of an architecture. Intel started to apply many of the RISC principles to their CISC microprocessors in the 1990s. For example, the PentiumPro processor has special functional units which crack the majority of the CISC instructions into simpler RISC operations. Internally, the PentiumPro and descendant processors are RISC machines.

The development cost considerables are ignored by the consumers, where the only considerations are outright speed and compatibility with older machines. This has lead to an interesting chain of events. As the complexity of developing more and more advanced CPUs increases, the cost of both development and fabrication of high-end CPUs has exploded. In effect, whatever cost gains RISC gave to the CPU designer has been lost, and today only the biggest chip makers are capable of making high performing CPUs. The end result is that virtually all RISC platforms with the exception of IBM's POWER/ PowerPC have greatly shrunk in scale of development of high performing CPUs (like SPARC and MIPS) or even abandoned (like Alpha and PA-RISC) during the 00s. As of 2004, x86 chips are the faster CPUs in SPECint displacing all RISC CPUs, and the fastest CPU in SPECfp is the IBM Power 5 processor.

Still, RISC designs have led to a number of successful platforms and architectures, some of the larger ones being:

• MIPS's MIPS line, found in most SGI computers and the Nintendo 64
• IBM's POWER series, used in all of their minis and mainframes
• Motorola and IBM's PowerPC (a version of POWER) used in all Apple Macintosh computers
• Sun's SPARC and UltraSPARC, found in all of their later machines
• Hewlett-Packard's PA-RISC HP/PA
• DEC Alpha
• ARM — Palm, Inc. originally used the (CISC) Motorola 680x0 processors in their early PDAs, but now uses (RISC) ARM processors in their latest PDAs

6 Meaningless term?

As the original RISC architectures evolved, the ones that have survived (notably the PowerPC) have acquired a variety of additional instructions, some of which are for quite elaborate operations useful for graphics. Implementations of the remaining CISC architecture in wide use, the x86, was optimized for use with a subset of the original operations, and also gained additional instructions to support graphics. With this convergence in design it is widely questioned whether such distinctions are particularly meaningful in the context of the computer market of 2003.

For this reason a number of people have started to use the term "load-store" to describe RISC chips, because this is the key element to all RISC designs. Instead of the CPU itself handling all sorts of addressing modes, a single separate unit is dedicated solely to handling all load and store operations. This is not the case for CISC designs, which continue to offer a rich set of addressing modes, and are sometimes referred to as "register-memory" to illustrate how they work.

7 See also

• addressing mode
• CISC
• microprocessor
• instruction set architecture
• computer architecture

Computer terminology Computer architecture

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