Re: Minutes from Feb 21 LSE Call

[Bill Davidsen <davidsen@tmr.com>]

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On 23 Feb 2003, Xavier Bestel wrote:

> Le dim 23/02/2003 à 20:17, Linus Torvalds a écrit :
> 
> > And the baroque instruction encoding on the x86 is actually a _good_
> > thing: it's a rather dense encoding, which means that you win on icache. 
> > It's a bit hard to decode, but who cares? Existing chips do well at
> > decoding, and thanks to the icache win they tend to perform better - and
> > they load faster too (which is important - you can make your CPU have
> > big caches, but _nothing_ saves you from the cold-cache costs). 
> 
> Next step: hardware gzip ?

If the firmware issues were better defined in Intel ia32 chips, I could
see a gzip instruction pointing to blocks in memory. As a proof of
concept, not a big win.

-- 
bill davidsen <davidsen@tmr.com>
  CTO, TMR Associates, Inc
Doing interesting things with little computers since 1979.