From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 X-Spam-Checker-Version: SpamAssassin 3.4.4 (2020-01-24) on polar.synack.me X-Spam-Level: X-Spam-Status: No, score=-1.3 required=5.0 tests=BAYES_00,INVALID_MSGID autolearn=no autolearn_force=no version=3.4.4 X-Google-Language: ENGLISH,ASCII-7-bit X-Google-Thread: 103376,332c43f83769ec80 X-Google-Attributes: gid103376,public From: Tucker Taft Subject: Re: Transmeta's New Processor Date: 2000/01/28 Message-ID: <3891FD3D.B1AF1A24@averstar.com>#1/1 X-Deja-AN: 578898474 Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit References: <8689gi$38l$1@nntp1.atl.mindspring.net> X-Accept-Language: en Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii X-Complaints-To: usenet@inmet2.burl.averstar.com X-Trace: inmet2.burl.averstar.com 949091646 766 141.199.8.164 (28 Jan 2000 20:34:06 GMT) Organization: AverStar (formerly Intermetrics) Burlington, MA USA Mime-Version: 1.0 NNTP-Posting-Date: 28 Jan 2000 20:34:06 GMT Newsgroups: comp.lang.ada Date: 2000-01-28T20:34:06+00:00 List-Id: Richard D Riehle wrote: > > As most of you know, Transmeta finally released some > details of its new processor family on Wednesday. As > I look this over, it occurs to me that it is another > Ada compiler opportunity. By default, the chip comes with software in ROM that handles normal Intel IA-32 instructions, so existing Ada compilers for IA-32 (aka x86) will work on the Transmeta. The software in ROM converts the IA-32 instruction stream into an instruction stream for the underlying VLIW hardware. It uses caching to avoid having to retranslate the same instruction repeatedly. I suppose you might take the transmeta as an opportunity to develop a completely new instruction set tailored to Ada, but one of the features of Transmeta is that they can change the underlying "hardware" anytime they want, and the only thing affected is the ROM'ed software. If you designed your own ISA, you would have to update the translation software for your ISA as well, which would require a pretty "cozy" relationship with Transmeta. I do expect them to create a version of the Transmeta ROM that directly executes Java byte codes some day. That might be an interesting Ada target, though Java byte code is annoying in that there is no way to stack-allocate a composite object -- everything composite has to be allocated in the heap. > ... The software environment > is based on Linux. Check out the details at: > > http://www.transmeta.com > > Richard Riehle > richard@adaworks.com -- -Tucker Taft stt@averstar.com http://www.averstar.com/~stt/ Technical Director, Distributed IT Solutions (www.averstar.com/tools) AverStar (formerly Intermetrics, Inc.) Burlington, MA USA