[rescue] sparc10 cpu - what to do.

[Jonathan Patschke]

On Mon, 19 Dec 2016, Dave McGuire wrote:

>> The design of the iAPX has always seemed very interesting to me; is it
>> at all feasible to find actual hardware for it out in the world?
>
>  Assuming you mean the iAPX-432 (many Intel architecture names start
> with iAPX), yes, a board and a few chips sold on eBay a few weeks ago,
> for astronomical sums.

I was just reading about '432 a few weeks ago, trying to decide if there's
a smaller (more FPGA-friendly) machine inside of it to run the rest of the
platform in microcode.  There's a lot of technical documentation out
there, but so much of the design violates the zero-one-infinity[0] rule
that it may really just belong in the dustbin of half-baked ideas.

There are some really compelling ideas in there about multiple "views" (I
forget the '432 term for them) into a given piece of address space, each
"view" having a different set of access privileges.

My personal opinion is that most of what '432 really interesting belongs
either in a virtual machine or operating system if only because they're
radical enough that Intel could hardly have gotten the balance right the
first time.


[0] Or at least s/infinity/address-space-divided-by-foo/.
-- 
Jonathan Patschke
Austin, TX
USA