Re: New assembly language instructions to support OO languages?

Glen Herrmannsfeldt <gah@ugcs.caltech.edu>
Fri, 05 Dec 2008 14:34:20 -0700

          From comp.compilers

Related articles
[9 earlier articles]
Re: New assembly language instructions to support OO languages? tony@my.net (Tony) (2008-12-05)
Re: New assembly language instructions to support OO languages? nmm1@cam.ac.uk (2008-12-05)
Re: New assembly language instructions to support OO languages? lkrupp@pssw.com (Louis Krupp) (2008-12-05)
Re: New assembly language instructions to support OO languages? nmm1@cam.ac.uk (2008-12-05)
Re: New assembly language instructions to support OO languages? walter@bytecraft.com (Walter Banks) (2008-12-05)
Re: New assembly language instructions to support OO languages? David.Schroth@unisys.com (David W Schroth) (2008-12-05)
Re: New assembly language instructions to support OO languages? gah@ugcs.caltech.edu (Glen Herrmannsfeldt) (2008-12-05)
Re: New assembly language instructions to support OO languages? gah@ugcs.caltech.edu (Glen Herrmannsfeldt) (2008-12-05)
Re: New assembly language instructions to support OO languages? georgeps@xmission.com (GPS) (2008-12-05)
Re: New assembly language instructions to support OO languages? gah@ugcs.caltech.edu (Glen Herrmannsfeldt) (2008-12-06)
Re: New assembly language instructions to support OO languages? mailbox@dmitry-kazakov.de (Dmitry A. Kazakov) (2008-12-06)
Re: New assembly language instructions to support OO languages? jasen@xnet.co.nz (Jasen Betts) (2008-12-06)
Re: New assembly language instructions to support OO languages? jgd@cix.compulink.co.uk (2008-12-06)
[19 later articles]
| List of all articles for this month |

From: Glen Herrmannsfeldt <gah@ugcs.caltech.edu>
Newsgroups: comp.compilers,comp.arch
Followup-To: comp.arch
Date: Fri, 05 Dec 2008 14:34:20 -0700
Organization: Aioe.org NNTP Server
References: 08-12-014 08-12-016 08-12-019 08-12-028
Keywords: architecture
Posted-Date: 05 Dec 2008 18:47:42 EST

nmm1@cam.ac.uk wrote:
(snip, I wrote)


>>This is very much against the RISC idea that all instructions
>>take about the same amount of time.


> Yes. That particular dogma lasted for quite a long time after it was
> shown to be a total fantasy but - hey! - rationality and sanity are
> just words :-)


I used a Sun 4/110 for many years, which I believe used one of the
original SPARC processors. Instead of a multiply instruction, it has
multiply step such that you execute some number of such instructions
(maybe one per product bit) to do fixed point multiply. Since it was
too much work for compilers to generate multiply step, it was instead
emulated by the system, possibly after an interrupt for a
non-implemented opcode. SunOS, like most unix systems, keeps track of
user and system time, and multiply counted as system time.


Maybe that was the example that showed that it wasn't a good idea.


-- glen


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