🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <1991May6.152803.5886@midway.uchicago.edu>, rtp1@quads.uchicago.edu (raymond thomas pierrehumbert) writes:
|> I have often heard the HP snake machines described as "not superscalar"
|> whereas the IBM RS/6000 are generally described as "superscalar."
|> What is it in the architectures of these two machines that supports
|> this distinction?  What are the consequences for the kinds of codes
|> that will run efficiently (particularly in terms of floating point
|> performance)?
|> 
|> (P.S.  could somebody email me a definition of "little endian" vs.
|> "big endian" ?  Are RS6000's, Suns and Macintoshes "big endian"?
|> What about i860?  Is it a property of the chip, or of the OS?)

Although one could concoct counterexamples, as normally used today
"superscalar" and "superpipelined" describe machine implementations,
not architectures.
            ------------------------------
A brief characterization of "little/big endian" is the following.
Suppose your machine computes the (hex) integer 0x12345678 in a
32 bit register.  And suppose it then stores the contents of that
register into bytes zero through three in memory.  If the byte at 
memory location zero contains 0x12, it is a big-endian machine.  
If the byte at location zero contains 0x78, it is a little-endian machine.

As usual this is oversimplified.  The full truth is more complicated
and considerably uglier.
-- 
                                   Dan Prener (prener @ watson.ibm.com)