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Kent Borg

@kenshirriff Very intriguing thread, as in "These might be good ideas!", until I saw a memory structure diagram and I realized all that walking would be done in hardware, and how slow are they trying to be?

And then I asked myself: What makes me think hardware can't walk data structures? I mean if software does it, the hardware still does it, right? What makes that slow?

5 May 2023 at 23:35 | Wall-to-wall | Open on social.tchncs.de
2 comments
Ken Shirriff

@kentborg Walking those data structures for every access is going to be slow whether it's done in hardware or software. Caching would have helped.

There's a detailed paper on why the 432 processor was so slow:
archive.org/details/432_comple

12 May 2023 at 19:42 | Open on oldbytes.space
Kent Borg

@kenshirriff Someone like TLBs are pretty necessary for performance.

12 May 2023 at 23:34 | Open on social.tchncs.de
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