The Heeg port of objectworks to some dual cpu 68k workstation - back  
in the day when 68k cpus were the dogs nadgers - did this core/blt  
split. Mike Reuger can probably remember the details. It did the  
bitblt and scanchars benchmarks *very* fast.

Then again the BrouHaHa/Archimedes port I did actually beat it on  
both those with a single 8MHz ARM2 :-) No cache at all, not even  
instruction prefetch. It's amazing what a clean instruction set and a  
barrel shifter can do for you.

I guess we could claim that using things like the Rome/Cairo plugin  
is doing a modern equivalent since it is supposed to pass off most  
rendering chores to the GPU. If Squeak made effective use of such  
capabilities for all the normal UI stuff it would certainly improve  
things; certainly it is effective in Sophie. Unfortunately there is  
still a huge amount of cruft in morphic/tweak that somehow soaks up  
cycles like like a nsaty corner on the Tour de France.

And there's Croquet of course.

tim
--
tim Rowledge; tim at rowledge.org; http://www.rowledge.org/tim
Strange OpCodes: DST: Deadlock System Tables