[rescue] OT: FeeCee rescue

[Joshua D. Boyd]

On Tue, Sep 30, 2003 at 04:05:52PM -0500, Jonathan C. Patschke wrote:

> CPU, G3:  It's a PowerPC derivative.  While not as ballsy as a beefy IBM
> 604e, it's a lot nicer than the 604e that Apple put in their machines.
> No shortage of registers, load-store operation, talks little endian and
> big endian and possibly VAX endian.  I think at least one variant of the
> family can do BCD arithmetic.  All that, and it takes little power and
> puts out little heat, too!

W.r.t. register shortage.

I'm told that MIPSpro mainly only uses 4 out of the 32 registers a MIPS
chip has, except for special cases (which would be tight loops that
don't make function calls mainly).  What I'm seeing looking through
tons of Hitachi SH-3 assembly code (obviously a non-scientific survey)
suggests that GCC for this chip doesn't use very many registers either.
I'm beginning to wonder if lots of general purpose registers is quite
what its cracked up to be.