On Saturday, 12/13/2003 at 06:50 EST, Paul Hanrahan <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > By themsleves the cycle times might not be of interest. The cycle times in > conjunction with explanation of fetch operations and how instructions and > their addresses are really resolved would probably be very instructive.
Instructive from an academic perspective, maybe, but not from a business point of view since how it "really" works can (and does) change from generation to generation. The reason the architecture has survived for so long is because its Prime Directive [apologies to G.L.] is to very specifically hide the underlying implementation from the programs. > Not complex examples but a few that illustrate why a compare and swap is > more reliable in a multi processor environment and an MVCL isn't. Paul, your wording suggests that MVCL isn't reliable under some conditions. The word "reliable" in this context must mean "conformance to specification". I.e. you are saying that sometimes MVCL doesn't do what the book says it does. Details, please. (Or I've misunderstood what you were trying to say!) Alan Altmark Sr. Software Engineer IBM z/VM Development
