[squeak-dev] Ooh, it would be awesome to run Squeak on this

Stefan Marr smalltalk at stefan-marr.de
Tue Apr 16 22:26:54 UTC 2013


Hi Jecel:

On 16 Apr 2013, at 23:51, "Jecel Assumpcao Jr." <jecel at merlintec.com> wrote:

> Stefan Marr wrote:
>> As a short-cut, the posix variants of those platform files "should just work".
>> And, yes, I am talking about the 16 or 64 cores and not about the ARM part.
> 
> That's great! I had thought that the 32KB per node local memory was too
> small, but doing the math I see it is a total of 512KB for the 16 core
> version which is not that much less than what the Tilera chips have.

Ok, now I see. I reread the manuals and I was wrongly assuming that the rest of the 32-bit address space is actually mapped into the 1GB of memory. But that doesn't seem to be necessarily true. Can't really tell what they do. The different manuals are talking in very general terms about what could be.

So, the main difference between Tilera and Epiphany is cache-coherency. While that's a big selling point of the Tilera, Epiphany does seem to work entirely without caches. That means, the RoarVM would crawl pretty much. And indeed, it might already run out of memory while loading and distributing the image over the different cores.

So, saying 'it will work' is indeed overly optimistic. Even if it would get as far as executing a benchmark, that's pretty much what you could do with it.
In the worst case, you'd need to have the interpreter code and part of the image within those 32KB…

Best regards
Stefan



-- 
Stefan Marr
Software Languages Lab
Vrije Universiteit Brussel
Pleinlaan 2 / B-1050 Brussels / Belgium
http://soft.vub.ac.be/~smarr
Phone: +32 2 629 2974
Fax:   +32 2 629 3525



More information about the Squeak-dev mailing list