[Hardware] language neutral processors

[Gary Fisher]

>> "Just out of curiosity: how much does one pay for such a kit? I don't
know whether my wife would approve of a major investment into something of
little perceived value."

Hans-Martin,

Marriage is based on "give and take" -- sometimes one must give excuses,
while at other times it's necessary to take chances.

<G>

The Xilinx ML401 runs about US$500.

Gary

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Hans-Martin Mosner" <hmm at heeg.de>
To: <hardware at lists.squeakfoundation.org>
Sent: Thursday, August 02, 2007 2:29 AM
Subject: Re: [Hardware] language neutral processors


Jecel Assumpcao Jr schrieb:
> I am back from a nice vacation (my first since 1982...) and see that you
> have all been waiting patiently for me to return before starting any
> interesting discussions ;-)
>
Ok, now that you're back, I can finally ask the questions which have
puzzled me ever since :-)
When implementing Smalltalk hardware, what kind of object memory design
would you prefer:
- object table vs. direct pointer
- ref counting vs. generation scavenging cs -whatever-
- page-based virtual memory vs. object-based VM vs. none at all
- in-band tags vs. out-of-band tags
Let me explain the last one. Smalltalk Implementations have typically
had in-bad tags, i.e. the tags have only meaning in a word which is
known to be an oop. The Burroughs machines had out-of-band tags, that
is, every memory word had an additional tag. That way, you could even
know whether a memory word contained uninterpreted bytes, a float value,
or an "oop" (descriptor).

> One interesting side effect of this trip is that I now have a new FPGA
> development kit - the ML401 from Xilinx.
>
Just out of curiosity: how much does one pay for such a kit? I don't
know whether my wife would approve of a major investment into something
of little perceived value :-)

Cheers,
Hans-Martin
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