On RISC Architecture

“RISC-V does not take three months. It takes closer to four years. If I’ve failed, so far, to account for the precision of this work, let me try again here. Computer architects are not software engineers, who use programming languages to talk to the machine. Even coders who can speak assembly or C, the so-called low-level languages, still do just that: They talk. Computer architects need to go deeper. Much deeper. All the way down to a preverbal realm. If they’re speaking at all, they’re speaking in gestures, motions: the way primitive circuits hold information. Computer architecture isn’t telling a machine what to do. It’s establishing the possibility that it can be told anything at all. The work is superhuman, if not fully alien. Put it this way: If you found the exact place in a human being where matter becomes mind, where body becomes soul—a place that no scientist or philosopher or spiritual figure has found in 5,000 years of frantic searching—wouldn’t you tread carefully? One wrong move and everything goes silent.”

Jason Kehe - https://www.wired.com/story/angelina-jolie-was-right-about-risc-architecture/. Interesting summary of RISC (reduced instruction set computer) which surpassed CISC (complex instruction set computer) in the 1980s because of its superior “performance and cost.” Computers rely on ISAs (instruction set architecture), and RISC-V International is a Switzerland-based company promoting its open-access option. “Computer architectures are so named because, well, that’s exactly what they are—architectures not of bricks but of bits… Everyone has their own way of explaining it. The ISA is the bridge, or the interface, between the hardware and the software. Or it’s the blueprint. Or it’s the computer’s DNA. These are helpful enough, as is the common comparison of an ISA to a language. ‘You and I are using English,’ as Redmond said to me at the conference. ‘That’s our ISA.’ But it gets confusing. Software speaks in languages too—programming languages. That’s why Patterson prefers dictionary or vocabulary. The ISA is less a specific language, more a set of generally available words.” It strikes me that this difficulty explaining ISAs echos the current neuroscientific debate about the relationship between language and the brain. For instance, in extended mind (EM) theory, language provides particular benefits that the brain couldn’t supply on its own. Wetware and software interact in what Clark refers to as the mangrove effect in a 1998 essay on “Magic Words.” Sometimes, the tree (language) does not grow into the island (brain), but the island arises around the growth of the tree. It strikes me that depictions of RISC computer architecture might better be understood along these lines.