Re: BiiN system

[dewar@cs.nyu.edu (Robert Dewar)]

Dave said

"With 20-20 hindsite, the BiiN machine would have been a perfect platform for
"modern" OO languages, such as Ada95, C++ or Eiffel.  It's a damn shame
that the corporation couldn't make it work."

I disagree, it was not ahead of its time, it was behind its time. It
represented a trend in CISC design thinking that at this stage I think
has been effectively discredited. The 432 itself was clearly an impossible
design (and the performance of the initial silicon was, as one would expect,
truly dreadful, and I doubt even Intel with all its techniques for making
crufty CISC designs chug along at a respectable speed, could have rescued
it. In many ways the 432 represented the direction of the VAX extended
even further, and it is interesting to note that DEC itself did NOT
make the mistake of attempting to do that.

Furthermore, it is likely that Intel itself will make a major shift at
some point (after all the P6 is really nothing but a pretty standard
RISC machine with a clever front end for translating 32-bit x86
code reasonably fast and efficiently -- it is really rather extraordinary
that we have a nice machine at the heart of the p6, which would be much
easier to generate good code for, but instead the compiler has to struggle
away generating junk x86 instructions, which are then converted back to
reasonable RISC code at runtime. The workings of the marketplace and he
demands of backwards compatibility sure create some odd technical
monstrosities :-)