Date: Sat, 01 May 1999 21:50:13 -0700 From: Kent Stewart <kstewart@3-cities.com> To: rick hamell <hamellr@dsinw.com> Cc: James Snow <sno@teardrop.org>, freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: Dual K6 Message-ID: <372BD985.2546F6E5@3-cities.com> References: <Pine.BSF.3.91.990501212142.11042D-100000@dsinw.com>
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rick hamell wrote: > > > James' letter got me curious and I went to AMD's web pages. They claim > > the AMD-K7 will superscalar pipelined, and have a bus capable of > > scaleable multiprocessing. See > > http://www.amd.com/news/prodpr/9882.html > > Interesting... to me this has been a big problem with AMD for a > while. I'm glad to see that they've finally addressed it. :) Another > reason to not buy Intel if it performs well. There is hope. When it comes to multi-tasking, the Motorola cpu's have long had an advantage because of the separate set of system registers. I don't know what the arrangement on the Power PC is. Intel cpu's have all of these registers that they have to save and load to change state and that wastes a lot of time when the system has to take the cpu away from the user. To really do floating point well takes even more registers and that makes the state changes even worse. I think 16 32-bit fp registers or 8 64-bit long floats are just about right. You need a register that you can use as an index for each fp register. Cray's 64 vectors of 64 instructions must have been a nightmare to handle. Scalar pipelined sounds a lot like the Cray 1S. That would be a start <grin>. -- Kent Stewart Richland, WA mailto:kstewart@3-cities.com http://www.3-cities.com/~kstewart/index.html To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-questions" in the body of the message
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