On Mon, Oct 15, 2001 at 07:35:36PM -0000, [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: >What I would like to see in a CPU is a means where you could >upload your own microcode, enabling design of specific instruction >sets to handle particular problems very efficiently.
What about (in an ideal world) just programming microcode directly, without having to make an extra instruction set on top of that? Suddenly, you would have both instant access to all the "ports" (or whatever the CPU makers call their execution units these days), a lot of registers, etc.. In addition, the problem with only a single decoder etc. on P4 would effectively go away entirely. The only problem I could see would be a lot more code having to go over the bus (and occupy more space in the instruction cache), especially as some people have pointed out that the microcode might very well be some form of VLIW :-) At least for us Linux users, having to recompile everything wouldn't be _that_ big of a problem -- source for about everything you'd need would be readily available (except that mprime would have to be ported, of course ;-) )... /* Steinar */ -- Homepage: http://www.sesse.net/ _________________________________________________________________________ Unsubscribe & list info -- http://www.scruz.net/~luke/signup.htm Mersenne Prime FAQ -- http://www.tasam.com/~lrwiman/FAQ-mers
