Dynabook hw cost

tim Rowledge tim at rowledge.org
Wed May 23 23:40:45 UTC 2007


On
> 	This is anecdotal (I wasn't involved), and because I
> wasn't involved, my memory is doubly foggy, BUT: Dave Patterson

That would be Dave Ungar :-)
>
> 	So, if you ever wondered why ParcPlace/Objectworks Smalltalk,
> and other Smalltalks that do JIT compiling of methods into native
> code, do so well on SPARC machines, now you know.

Oddly enough none of the sparc tag stuff turned out to help us with  
that particular code generator; and the register windows stuff caused  
so much hassle I think it was ignored as much as possible. It's so  
long ago now I can barely even recall any details. I do remember a  
chip step that changed the cache clearing instruction from closed  
interval to semi-closed so that we had a terrifyingly tricky to debug  
case where just occasionally the i-cache flush (after generating  
machine code for a method) didn't flush out the last word any more  
and so the generated code was wrong *on reload*. I think several  
weeks of brain-banging resulted.

tim
--
tim Rowledge; tim at rowledge.org; http://www.rowledge.org/tim
Useful random insult:- One flower short of an arrangement.





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