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Re: Joint Design of Instruction Set and Language

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John Levine <johnl@iecc.com> writes:
>>In some sense many RISCs are C processors (or maybe Pascal), ...
>
>The Berkeley RISC and the SPARC were, in practice if not in theory,
>designed around the PCC C compiler.  The reason they used register
>windows was that PCC wasn't smart enough to minimize register saves.
>The IBM 801, designed at the same time with the much more advanced
>PL.8 compiler had a normal register set and load/store multiple
>since the compiler was able to minimize the number of registers
>to store.

And IA-64, which was designed for extremely sophisticated compiler
technology, has the register stack, which is a more flexible version
of register windows.  Register windows may not help much in SPEC CPU,
but programs that are actually used are compiled with separate
compilation, use dynamic linking and indirect calls (e.g., virtual
function calls), and even sophisticated compilers are quite limited in
their register allocation capabilities under these circumstances.

Of course, if you cannot get a competetive clock rate and IPC for the
resulting hardware, the register stack/windows won't save you.

- anton
-- 
M. Anton Ertl                    Some things have to be seen to be believed
anton@mips.complang.tuwien.ac.at Most things have to be believed to be seen
http://www.complang.tuwien.ac.at/anton/home.html

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Joint Design of Instruction Set and Language jsavard@excxn.aNOSPAMb.cdn.invalid (John Savard) - 2011-07-15 00:24 +0000
  Re: Joint Design of Instruction Set and Language nmm1@cam.ac.uk - 2011-07-15 08:36 +0100
    Re: Joint Design of Instruction Set and Language Bill Findlay <yaldnif.w@blueyonder.co.uk> - 2011-07-15 18:05 +0100
  Re: Joint Design of Instruction Set and Language anton@mips.complang.tuwien.ac.at (Anton Ertl) - 2011-07-15 08:14 +0000
    Re: Joint Design of Instruction Set and Language John Levine <johnl@iecc.com> - 2011-07-15 10:32 +0000
      Re: Joint Design of Instruction Set and Language Anne & Lynn Wheeler <lynn@garlic.com> - 2011-07-15 10:18 -0400
      Re: Joint Design of Instruction Set and Language anton@mips.complang.tuwien.ac.at (Anton Ertl) - 2011-07-15 16:30 +0000
        Re: Joint Design of Instruction Set and Language Anne & Lynn Wheeler <lynn@garlic.com> - 2011-07-15 14:26 -0400
    Re: Joint Design of Instruction Set and Language torbenm@diku.dk (Torben Ægidius Mogensen) - 2011-07-15 14:26 +0200
      Re: Joint Design of Instruction Set and Language Terje Mathisen <"terje.mathisen at tmsw.no"> - 2011-07-15 15:59 +0200
    Re: Joint Design of Instruction Set and Language jsavard@excxn.aNOSPAMb.cdn.invalid (John Savard) - 2011-07-15 13:48 +0000

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