Due Tuesday, January 16.
Read the following papers:
- Architecture of the IBM System/360 - G.M. Amdahl, G.A. Blaauw, and F.P. Brooks Jr.
- Design of the B5000 System (Republished version here, might be easier to read) - William Lonergan and Paul King
- The Case for the Reduced Instruction Set Computer - Patterson and Ditzel
- Comments on "The Reduced Instruction Set Computer," by Patterson and Ditzel - Douglas W. Clark and William D. Strecker
Comment on the papers. For each paper, provide a short (a few
sentences) summary of the focus of the paper or key arguments made.
Make sure to specifically address these points:
- IBM 360 vs B5000
- What key different architecture decisions did they make? For
example, data size, floating point size, instruction size,
registers, etc.
- Which features largely survive to this day in current ISAs?
- RISC vs CISC
- What arguments were made for and against RISC and CISC?
- What do we largely use now
Your comments do not need to be long at all; I mostly want to
make sure that you've thought about the important parts of each
paper.