CS Degree Day 73

What I did today?

• Lecture 5: The von Neumann architecture
• Lecture 6: Instruction set architecture - the Beta ISA used in 6.1910
• Lecture 7: Datapath for the Beta

The Beta is a simplified 32-bit RISC ISA invented for this course. RISC philosophy: small number of simple instructions, each takes one cycle. Contrast with CISC (x86): many complex instructions, variable cycles. The history here is a war that RISC lost commercially and won technically - modern x86 chips decode CISC instructions into RISC micro-ops internally.