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- Newsgroups: comp.arch
- Path: sparky!uunet!darwin.sura.net!mips!mips!kpc!mac
- From: mac@kpc.com (Mike McNamara)
- Subject: Re: Translating ML (was Re: MVC and MVCL)
- Message-ID: <1992Jul29.155435.18646@kpc.com>
- Sender: usenet@kpc.com
- Organization: Kubota Pacific Computer Incoporated, Santa Clara, CA
- References: <BrrBvA.E0w@zoo.toronto.edu> <1992Jul24.190506.6168@PA.dec.com> <65D202Zn1bIR01@JUTS.ccc.amdahl.com>
- Date: Wed, 29 Jul 1992 15:54:35 GMT
- Lines: 28
-
- In article <65D202Zn1bIR01@JUTS.ccc.amdahl.com> jjs40@cd.amdahl.com (John Sullivan) writes:
- | Here's an interesting philosphical question: If a new architecture
- | (say, Alpha) is primarily used by customers to run translated code
- | from an older architecture (say, VAX) then what kind of synthetic
- | effect will this have on the priorities of the CPU designers in designing
- | higher-performance future generations of their machine?
- |
- | For example, if translated code makes a lot of use of "compatibility" type
- | features that were never intended to be very fast, will these features win
- | out in gates in future versions of the CPU as opposed to spending the gates
- | on improving the "better" features from the new architecture? Will architects
- | have to "dirty" their architecture in future versions by adding new features
- | (say, byte-wide or unaligned loads) to support better performance on
- | translated code?
-
- Not if the users of Alpha "free the underlying risc machine" and run
- OSF / NT on it. Perhaps we will see more NT and OSF kernels on alpha than VMS
- kernels on Alpha...
-
- Let the users decide..
-
- -mac
-
- --
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