[rescue] SS10/20 death

[dave at cca.org]

mcguire at neurotica.com writes:

>On February 5, dave at cca.org wrote:
>> Do you think the SPARC's register windows were a good idea? (For a
>> general purpose unix box, that is.)

>  Tremendously good, yes.

That's good to hear. I thought the extra work of spilling to the stack
and especially the added complexity of context switches might negate
the wins, at least for general unix/c codes. It kind of looks more like
a custom OS embedded app type design.

Have you ever enocuntered anyone using the windows for anything
other than function calls?

SPARC's register windows always seemed like one of the weird &
abandoned experiments in the crazy early days of the "RISC hype" before
a few years of actually producing machines made it obvious that the
wins of "RISC" amounted to: load/store arch & fixed length instructions.
(Which is why I still think Cray's machines qualify, all the way back
to the CDC-6600.)


------ David Fischer ------- dave at cca.org ------- http://www.cca.org ------
---------------------- "It's something to do." Cerebus --------------------