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Yes! Finally a comment addressing the article. I think it would be nice to explore what the hardware would end up looking like if people had optimized it to m
by rolandog 1y ago
Yes! Finally a comment addressing the article. I think it would be nice to explore what the hardware would end up looking like if people had optimized it to mainly run Lisp, FORTRAN, Go, etc.
Would it have been better, faster, cheaper, more flexible, etc?
- magicalhippo 1y agoGet yourself a FPGA dev board and get cracking. You can get useful ones for like $50 or less. I've made a couple of simple soft-CPUs for self-designed instruction sets, aling with some compilers. Really fun to try to think of which instructions to include and how it interacts with the compiler.
- flohofwoe 1y agoJust look at the Intel iAPX 432 [1] as example for such an alternative CPU design, this was supposed to be the actual 8080 successor and 8086 was just supposed to be a temporary throwaway solution until the 432 was ready. The rest is history as they say ;) Meanwhile, the C programming model turned out a pretty good fit for very different hardware architectures. All 3D API shader languages have a C heritage for instance, despite GPUs being radically different than traditional CPUs. In the end only three things matter in hardware design: throughput, throughput and throughput ;) [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intel_iAPX_432 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intel_iAPX_432