MIPS16 : High-density MIPS for the embedded market
K. D Kissell · 1997
The invention of RISC, or Reduced Instruction Set Computer technology, has been credited to several people. Certainly a great deal of the credit must go to John Cocke of IBM’s Yorktown research labs, where a processor called the 801 (named for the building in which Cocke and his team worked) pioneered the concept of designing processors and compilers in tandem. In the days when most applications were coded in assembly language, there was some programmer productivity to be gained in providing powerful machine instructions that handled complex tasks, such as single instructions that search memory for a particular value or even solve polynomial equations. The earliest 16-bit microprocessors, such as the 8086, 68000, Z8000 and NS32016 inherited this legacy from the minicomputers they were intended to replace.