From Blefuscu Re: [squeak-dev] Re: [Vm-dev] Accelerating LargeIntegersPlugin phase 2

tim Rowledge tim at rowledge.org
Mon Jan 21 00:33:02 UTC 2013


On 20-01-2013, at 2:13 PM, "Edgar J. De Cleene" <edgardec2005 at gmail.com> wrote:

> 
> 
> 
> On 1/20/13 3:51 PM, "tim Rowledge" <tim at rowledge.org> wrote:
> 
>>> 
>>> Most certainly not, Edgar still has one.
> 
> Two G4's in working conditions

I have to admit that I do indeed have an old PPC mac mini as a house control server ( Indigo running my Insteon powerline network switchgear around the house; a pretty good setup). But I don't run Squeak on it.

> A old Byte magazine say
> Best 8 bits microprocessor = 6502
> Best 16 bits microprocessor = Z80
> Best 32 bits microprocessor = 68000

That was decently true in say 1984, though you could certainly argue that the NatSemi 32000 series was cleaner architecturally; they took the whole orthogonal registers/addressing modes/etc thing very seriously. Unfortunately they totally screwed up the execution and the cpu's performance was *dismal*. In some of the code I wrote for a 3D design system back then, my BBC micro (2MHz 6502) was faster. But by '87 the ARM was on the scene even thought most people wouldn't even hear of it for another decade. The very first ARM cpus running at 8MHz would outrun anything intel had at the time by at least a factor of 2. That was a cpu with no cache at all, not even an instruction prefetch queue.

But Big Endian? No excuse. Just no possible excuse for it. 

tim
--
tim Rowledge; tim at rowledge.org; http://www.rowledge.org/tim
Never write software that anthropomorphizes the machine. They hate that.




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