Does Size Matter?

[iamaboringperson]

Now that we've gone the PPC route, are we doomed to bloated SW like on the PC?

HELL NO! amiga and morphOS software will always be very compact

CISC is smaller instructions

if you mean smaller as in number of bytes, you're wrong. x86 instructions can be anywhere between 1byte and 20bytes wide! or more

but decoded, they use the same amount of clock cycles (as several RISC commands) to execute.

not quite - its actually quite a bit more complex than that...

So, going RISC, we pay with overhead of HD space, and reading into ram from HD, and more ram needed, as well.

as a general rule of thumb, RISC programs are roughly 1.5 times the size of CISC
but it depends on the software
so that just means that instead of an amiga executable of 1 meg, it might be about 1.5

of course, all the data that comes with it will be the same size. if its a game, the graphics and audio(which make up the bulk of any modern game) will take up the same space

Are we ahead, at the same clock speed?

cycle for cycle? we sure are!

This question is based on my limited knowledge of CPUs, OSs, and compilers, so try to fill in the holes where my statements are flawed.

sorry, but some of your questions/statments i didnt understand! ;-)

[iamaboringperson]

The 64-bit implementations will still use 32-bit sized opcodes,

thats the bit that i was unsure of! :lol: (at times im to lazy to go and do the research myself)

Idea* idea = new Idea(random());
while (idea->isCrap()) {
  delete idea; idea = new Idea(random());
}

:lol: karlos! i think you have just exposed the secrets to human inteligence! i could imagine pretty soon you will have a software human being(AI) in its beta testing stage ;-)

[iamaboringperson]

QNX's kernal is apparently 32k for x86's, and about 48k for RISC CPU's

not a huge difference

remember also, that windows NT was almost equaly as bloated on RISC hardware as it was CISC - it wasnt a great deal larger

[iamaboringperson]

Idea* idea = new Idea(random());
while (idea->isCrap()) {
  delete idea; idea = new Idea(random());
}

looks like you are using a read-ahead type loop there, im usually picky about read ahead loops since in most languages they can be easily avoided by replacing a while loop with a do ... while :-)  then you have a wee bit less code ;-)