Lisp, the machine language. Was Re: Hallelujah!

From: Eric Smith <eric_at_brouhaha.com>
Date: Sun Apr 4 04:50:17 1999

"Buck Savage" <hhacker_at_home.com> wrote:
> Actually, microcode is not compiled.

All the microcode I've ever written was compiled. Of course, it was
compiled from special source languages defined for that explicit purpose.
No one with any sense would write a non-trivial amount of microcode any
other way.

> The i860 is a single chip implementation of the Cray-1,

No, it isn't. Don't believe all the marketing hype you read; those guys are
paid to lie their asses off. The architecture isn't even *close* to that of
the Cray-1. In particular, the i860 is not a vector processor. It is a
primitive superscalar processor, with a lot of the pipeline exposed to the
programmer. It is tough to write a good compiler for it.

> and provides just about the same throughput as the Cray-1.

Almost, for some things. But not for heavily vectorizable problems.
Received on Sun Apr 04 1999 - 04:50:17 BST