[ANN] [UPDATES] Squeak 3.4 now in beta

Tim Rowledge tim at sumeru.stanford.edu
Fri Dec 6 18:17:26 UTC 2002


Alan Kay <Alan.Kay at squeakland.org> is claimed by the authorities to have written:

> What's the story on FP -and- graphics coprocessors on ARMs these days?
A little complicated but getting interesting. The latest ARM
architectures have added options for vector floating point units
(ARM1020FE for example) and DSP and SIMD media handling and even (yuck,
spit) java bytecode handling. Samsung have announced impending
availability of an ARM1020 at 1.2GHz.
Of course, it gets more complicated if you consider systems with high
power graphics cards aswell since they sort of nullify the value of some
of these extrnsions. Then again ARMs are generally targetted at devices
without nVidious Mega-Nitro Turbo 2000 mkMXM dual head cards.
An interesting recent approach from ARM is to have made the v6
architecture clean for both superscalar and multiple cpu-per-die
approaches, so maybe something interesting wil happen in that area. I'm
still waiting for somebody to take literally the old joke about an ARM
being a cpu hiding in the corner of a RAM chip and making a mongo RAM
with a smart cpu that has full speed memory access.
> 
> Did Intel really not put FP on the X scale processors?
Really. They managed to mess up plenty of things in the development
process as well; even today the USB support in parts like the 80231 is
duff. They seem to be almost embarrassed to have the part selling so
well. I suppose they feel awkward about not having invented it.

tim

-- 
Tim Rowledge, tim at sumeru.stanford.edu, http://sumeru.stanford.edu/tim
Useful random insult:- Several nuts over fruitcake minimum.




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