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Well yeah, kind of. In the olden days we thought that massively complex instructions on chips with huge microcode would be just the thing. Simplify your code by calling a single machine code instruction that does a complete matrix manipulation, or solves a polynomial, kind of thing. It turned out that making CPUs that worked that way was expensive and complicated, and if they didn't quite work you were stuck with it. Then, it further turned out that actually it was easier to be Good At Software than it was to be Good At Hardware. If you wrote a clever assembler, and a clever compiler, and some clever libraries, you still didn't need to care about solving horrible maths, you just called a function to do it. And then, we came around to the idea that it was faster to use small simple instructions and cache a lot of them, and keep as many of the values we were juggling in registers so you didn't waste time with a memory cycle. So, CPUs got simpler instruction architectures and all that space previously used for selecting ever increasingly baroque instructions in the opcode could be used to select from an ever-growing number of registers. Ultimately CPUs will be only able to do a lsl, mov, add, and xor, in a single conditional instruction, with 131072 64-bit registers to choose from, in a single clock cycle at 10GHz or so. People will still say "well yeah but do you really need that add?" |