Interval Smalltalk redux (was "SqueakOS")

Tim Rowledge tim at sumeru.stanford.edu
Fri Oct 4 00:58:13 UTC 2002


Tommy Thorn <thorn at meko.dk> is claimed by the authorities to have written:

> The ARM is pretty big in the embedded space. Did the ASIC provide 
> functionality crucial for the native implementation of Smalltalk on 
> StrongARM?
Well, yes - it provided the interface to memory and the LCD panel etc
since there were no commercial support chips at the time the h/w was
designed. These days one would probably just buy a standard part or
maybe even go with the SA1110 instead, which has most of it onchip.
> 
> Not that I'm suggesting it, but FPGAs have progressed significantly in 
> recent years. Yesterdays ASICs might be reimplementable with todays 
> FPGAs (at a considerbly lower NRE cost).
If you were thinking of some magical hardware interpreter, forget it.
Completely pointless unless you're doing it for fun or longterm
research. Much better to put the effort into a good translation system
to make good use of plain ol'vendor parts that will be twice as fast and
half the price by the time you have it done. Don't fight Moore's Law.

> Again, what special hardware support is needed? Object memory like on 
> the Newton?
Bandwidth. Big onchip cache (128Mb would be nice :-) More bandwidth.
Very fast interrupt handling (ARM does this part well).

tim

-- 
Tim Rowledge, tim at sumeru.stanford.edu, http://sumeru.stanford.edu/tim
Strange OpCodes: SOD: Scribble On Disk




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