Which is the most beautiful and memorable hardware structure in a CPU?

Hi,
From the first moment I learn how stack segment and stack pointer are
used to link all subroutines in PC, I have been appreciating the
hardware structure as I can and I think it is the the most beautiful
and memorable hardware structure I have learn from the CPU structure.

I want to know who invented the structure. Is an IBM engineer?

And it is strange enough that after PC was created, no big new
structure in CPU has ever invented. MESI protocol? No. Changing 1 core
to 2 core, or even 8 cores is considered as a big invention? No.

Oh, I forgot to mention the most important invention since then is the
Mouse we use it every day.

Any idea?

Weng

On Mar 29, 4:06=A0am, Weng Tianxiang <wtx...@gmail.com> wrote:
> ...
> From the first moment I learn how stack segment and stack pointer are
> used to link all subroutines in PC, I have been appreciating the
> hardware structure as I can and I think it is the the most beautiful
> and memorable hardware structure I have learn from the CPU structure.
> I want to know who invented the structure. Is an IBM engineer?
> And it is strange enough that after PC was created, no big new
> structure in CPU has ever invented. MESI protocol? No. Changing 1 core
> to 2 core, or even 8 cores is considered as a big invention? No.
> Oh, I forgot to mention the most important invention since then is the
> Mouse we use it every day.
> Any idea?
> ...
> Weng

A little bit OT... anyway I think you mean the "von Neumann
architecture" and
the "Harvard architecture" both being maybe the most (but not the
only)
used CPU architectures.
You can use as start point the followings:
   http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Von_Neumann_architecture
   http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harvard_architecture

Regards
Sandro

Sandro wrote:
> A little bit OT...
Yes, this thread would better suit the comp.arch group.
There are great CPU architecture specialists there :-)

> Regards
> Sandro
yg

-- 
http://ygdes.com / http://yasep.org

I think it was a high level language feature first.

Are you talking of indexed indirect addressing mode (reg+#immediate)
or the link unlink instruction sets for setting the stack pointer?
Would the 6502 8 bit micro (ZZ),Y mode count? Or are you more PDP-11?

On Sun, 28 Mar 2010 19:06:23 -0700 (PDT), Weng Tianxiang wrote:

>From the first moment I learn how stack segment and stack pointer are
>used to link all subroutines in PC, I have been appreciating the
>hardware structure as I can and I think it is the the most beautiful
>and memorable hardware structure I have learn from the CPU structure.

Aw, c'mon.  Most of that is software - the only hardware
requirements are the ability to copy a stack pointer
to/from some other place, and the ability to construct an
address that's offset from a register or memory value.

For sheer luminous beauty, let's hear it for the PDP-8's
JMS instruction...

oh, maybe not.  OK, second attempt.  SPARC register windows.

No?  Don't like that?  OK, the Transputer's tiny 3-register
evaluation stack, with context switches permitted only at
points where the stack is known to be empty.  The
21st century operating system wonks could REALLY learn
something about lightweight elegance from that one.

What about the whole idea of a stack?  How cool is that,
if you haven't seen it before?

Set-associative cache?

Sheesh, the field is so crowded with beautiful, genius-level
ideas - but we're all so familiar with them that we don't 
see how hard it must have been to come up with them in 
the first place.  Trying to single out just one is silly.

>Oh, I forgot to mention the most important invention since then is the
>Mouse we use it every day.

Crap.

Are you *really* trying to convince us that the mouse is
more important, elegant, beautiful than...
- convolution codes? and Shannon's theorem?
- quadrature modulation?
- Boolean algebra?  Set theory?
- The Fourier transform?
- crystallography?
- The Goldberg Variations?

The kind of slavish technology-worship that your original
question exemplifies is depressing and backward-looking;
it leads us into relying on past achievements instead of
being thrilled by what might be if only we keep questioning.
It's the kind of thinking that should (but too often does
not) give technologists and businessmen a bad reputation.

We technologists are the 21st-century equivalent of the
19th century ironfounders.  We're exploiting the heroic
achievements of the recent past to build the infrastructure
that the future needs.  We are facilitators, not visionaries.
The next half-century belongs to the molecular biologists
and geneticists, and we are merely there to help out with
the menial work.  Get a sense of proportion.
-- 
Jonathan Bromley

Jonathan Bromley wrote:
> Crap.
> 
> Are you *really* trying to convince us that the mouse is
> more important, elegant, beautiful than...
> - convolution codes? and Shannon's theorem?
> - quadrature modulation?
> - Boolean algebra?  Set theory?
> - The Fourier transform?
> - crystallography?
> - The Goldberg Variations?

I'll add the Burrows-Wheeler transform which enables great compression
and the Reed-Solomon method for forward error correction, used in so many places.
I wish I could come up with something as mind-boggling AND useful.

> The kind of slavish technology-worship that your original
> question exemplifies is depressing and backward-looking;
> it leads us into relying on past achievements instead of
> being thrilled by what might be if only we keep questioning.
> It's the kind of thinking that should (but too often does
> not) give technologists and businessmen a bad reputation.
he seems to be too young or too noob to understand that yet.
Give him 10 or 20 years...

> Get a sense of proportion.
This comes with learning, and Internet is a great facilitator
for this. And other less noble things, but so is the human nature...

yg
-- 
http://ygdes.com / http://yasep.org

The most memorable hardware structure is the vector indirect
addressing mode.

Mitch

On Mon, 29 Mar 2010 19:39:12 -0700, MitchAlsup wrote:

> The most memorable hardware structure is the vector indirect addressing
> mode.

I had a soft spot for the 3D-matrix-stride post-modify addressing mode 
that the Motorola 56000 had, for a while.  (The processor still has the 
mode, I'm no longer so sure it was a good idea...)  Certainly memorable.

Cheers,

-- 
Andrew

In article <27ebdb37-e3ba-4559-be7d-d7f3b6613d77@30g2000yqi.googlegroups.com>,
MitchAlsup  <MitchAlsup@aol.com> wrote:
>The most memorable hardware structure is the vector indirect
>addressing mode.

Yes.  There were and are more bizarre ones, but they are Not Memorable
(see Sellars and Yeatman).


Regards,
Nick Maclaren.

On Mar 30, 10:38=A0am, n...@cam.ac.uk wrote:

> Yes. =A0There were and are more bizarre ones, but they are Not Memorable
> (see Sellars and Yeatman).

Ooooh, I like that.  Always good to bring a bit of high culture
into the discussion.

It may be Memorable, hut was it a Good Thing?

_Sellar_ and Yeatman, I think you'll find (without the trailing 's').

Thanks for tickling a long-dormant and much cherished memory.
--
Jonathan Bromley