Joe, <Why did you add the word "assembly"?>
Because if I understand it right, "polymorphism" can occur on several levels. If it's the actual assembly code which modifies itself, that's the "polymorphic assembly code" that I was talking about. That would probably give any processor the fits, though more so on Pentium 4 and Itanium than Pentium III and Athlon.
My impression is that polymorphism actually occurs one or two levels above assembly. Especially for interpreted languages like VB or Java, the assembly code of the interpreter doesn't change. It's the actual input to the interpreter that changes, but that's far enough detached that polymorphism won't affect the processor.
But what do I know. At least my feeling is that there is no such thing as the "do-it-all" processor anymore. Performance enhancements these days require specific support from software, whether it's Pentium 4 optimization, or SSE2, or enhanced 3DNow!, or x86-64, or IA-64, or even thread-level parallelization.
Tenchusatsu |
