A Comparison of Two Microprogrammable Processors: PDP-11/40E and MLP- 900

Abstract

A study was undertaken to evaluate the capabilities of two microprogrammable processors: the MLP-900, a vertically-encoded 36-bit machine at the Information Sciences Institute and available over the ARPA Network; and the PDP-11/40E, a horizontally-encoded 16-bit microprocessor at Carnegie-Mellon University. The paper presents a description of the two machines, and compares their performance on a number of benchmark programs (including an emulator for the NOVA computer). In addition, the machines are compared along dimensions of two-way conditional branch costs, basic architecture, and difficulty of programming. The PDP-11/40E performed between 10% and 25% faster on all the benchmarks except the multi-word integer multiply, where the MLP-900 was four times faster (because of its wider data path).

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Document Details

Document Type
Technical Report
Publication Date
May 01, 1975
Accession Number
ADA013113

Entities

People

  • John D. Oakley

Organizations

  • Carnegie Mellon University

Tags

DTIC Thesaurus Topics

  • Access Time
  • Arithmetic
  • Clocks
  • Compilers
  • Computer Programming
  • Computer Programs
  • Computer Science
  • Computers
  • Data Storage Systems
  • Decoding
  • Information Science
  • Instruction Set Architecture
  • Language
  • Microcode
  • Microprocessors
  • Midrange Computers
  • Simulators

Fields of Study

  • Computer science

Readers

  • Computer Engineering
  • Computer Science.
  • Neural Network Machine Learning.