I want to play with making hardware targeting a SLATE-based environment.

[Glenn Alexander]

On Thursday 27 March 2003 19:31, Steven Shaw wrote:
> Hi Glen,
>
> I don't know much about computer architecture. Never learnt much. I was
> reading about the PowerPC architecture and it seems pretty groovy. It has
> 32 integer registers and 32 floating point registers.
>
> Steve.

Hi fellow Australian,
(I'm actually situated in NE China at present)

PowerPC is a pretty chunky processor core, which is fine for what it was designed to do, but I'm not a big fan on account of the 
complexity (relative to other RISC architectures) of the instruction set. That intends to get in the way of efficient optimisations 
by compilers/interpreters. Particularly if you are trying to do those optimisations on the fly. It also gobbles power a bit more 
than I like (I'm interested in portable devices).

Although a big improvement over the x86 architecture it was meant to replace (as well as the 680x0 architecture that it did replace 
for desktop systems), it doesn't stack up against 'cleaner' RISC architectures in my book.


The SH5 with its 64x 64-bit registers and a fresh, clean design explicitly optimised for fast efficient compilation looks very good 
(except for the messy tacked-on FPU), but unfortunately it is so new you can only buy the core, not an actual chip (and I don't have 
a fabrication plant or a few hundred thousand dollars to pay for a run :-( 

The Crusoe is the most readily avaliable in the low-power/high-performance class, but I'm not convinced it is the best option when 
you don't need x86 compatibility (ie, you are running anything other than MS-Windows). I'll see if/what Transmeta reply to the email 
I sent them. If you ignore the x86 emulation, the Crusoe is a pretty good chip. It even has a dual-memory bus that can be made to 
fit the strange memory architecture I have in mind (possibly even using an off-the-shelf Single-Board-Computer). If it can be 
coerced to emulating the Slate engine instead of x86, it would be even better ;-)