🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <848@llnl.LLNL.GOV> brooks@tazdevil.llnl.gov (Eugene D. Brooks III) writes:
>In article <1991May16.221437.10751@rice.edu> preston@ariel.rice.edu (Preston Briggs) writes:
>>The i860 can smoke a Sparc, but it takes a smart (mostly non-existant)
>>compiler and the right applications.  A man at Alliant charactarized
>>the 860 as having a small "sweet spot".
>The "sweet spot" of the i860, 4 K bytes, is indeed very small.  That
>the chip is so difficult to compile for indicates a poorly designed
>architecture.

I seriously doubt that by "sweet spot", he was referring to just the
size of the cache which can't be directly compared across
architectures based on just size as it matters how they are managed
and replenished. Rather, I think he was referring to the complexity of
coding for the i860's multiple processing units which I believe they
expose to the software (not one of those supersmart superscalar
out-of-order-execution guys).

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