Yoel Jacobsen <yoel at emet.co.il> wrote:
	By the way, I made these tests because I was troubled by how slow squeak 
	is on Solaris (~25M bytecode/sec on Ultra 10 440MHz, ~45M on this Blade 
	1000)... I'm quite sure it will get no better unless squeak will be 
	ported to 64bit.
	
I don't know if it applies to the latest UltraSPARCs, but in the earlier
models, 32-bit *signed* ints are slower than 32-bit *unsigned* ints.
When you load a 32-bit signed int, it's sign extended, which takes an
extra cycle _unless_ the CPU was already expecting that.  Unsigned ints
are zero extended, which doesn't take that extra cycle.  So a mix of
signed and unsigned loads is slower than a straight set of signed loads
or a straight set of unsigned loads.  It was quite easy to measure the
difference.