On 4 November 2011 21:11, Jonathan "Duke" Leto <[email protected]> wrote: > Howdy, > >> After then, I'm not sure what the added instructions were for, but I suspect >> that they aren't going to be for things that JITs find useful. >> >> I'd suggest working out what ARM CPU architecture current Debian builds for, >> and doing that first. Then looking at what the later architectures offer, >> and only if they have something significantly useful that plugs a hole in >> the table, actually treating them differently. >> >> I'm not sure of the state of hardware floating point, as in, which chips >> have it (or means to do it), and how many different variations of it there >> are.
Afaik, all new ARM chips have NEON (which is SIMD), and all of them support VFP, which is generally implemented on top of NEON (in hardware, so we don't need to care). Some Cortex A8 have significant limitations to VFP, but with A9 it should be as seamless as x87. Of course, using NEON directly is often a better idea. And this is all for single precision, don't know what they do for double. About JIT targets, ARM used to have a Java Bytecode execution extension (Jazelle). Recently, this has morphed into Thumb EE, which is a set of extensions to Thumb (2 i think) aimed at helping JITs. It tends to be even more compact that regular Thumb. Afaik, all Cortex A8 and upwards have Thumb EE. > Thanks for the good advice, Nick. I recently saw a shiny new ARM v7 netbook > being wielded at a conference. Does anybody on this list have an ARM netbook? > I > would love to know some more details. I have vague memories of lucian++ > talking > about an ARM netbook recently, but I may be wrong. I have an Efika MX http://www.genesi-usa.com/products/smartbook It's Cortex A8, made by Freescale I think. There's a nettop version that's cheaper. There's also the (beagle|panda|w/e)boards. And all those Android phones. _______________________________________________ http://lists.parrot.org/mailman/listinfo/parrot-dev
