Quote from: eldentyrell on August 05, 2013, 03:26:33 AM

Quote from: Ytterbium on July 27, 2013, 06:32:51 PM

(like using RISC internally and translating the instructions it)

Hrm, doesn't that mean that RISC won out in the end, even though the companies that first introduced it didn't? So from the standpoint of a product manager deciding whether to fund a RISC project or a CISC project, the right thing to do was to listen to the debates.

Well, I guess RISC won out in a way when you look at ARM dominating the cellphone market. However, what I meant was that the instruction set that programmers/compilers used, as opposed to the chips designs themselves that didn't matter.

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Quote from: Ytterbium on July 27, 2013, 06:32:51 PM

All that matters is the real-world performance.

To the end-user, and to the blockchain, of course!

But if you're the company that has money to spend and are trying to figure out which design to spend money on, you want something like the η-factor. Just like how the project managers at Intel listened carefully to the RISC-CISC debate and made the right decision in the end even though, at the time they made that decision, RISC chips were overpriced and performing poorly.

Well, the problem is that you can have hand-routed designs and other optimizations that only apply at certain feature sizes. Most analogue design work won't carry directly over in a die shrink.