Silicon Investor (SI) -- The First Internet Community

STOCKTALK

We've detected that you're using an ad content blocking browser plug-in or feature. Ads provide a critical source of revenue to the continued operation of Silicon Investor. We ask that you disable ad blocking while on Silicon Investor in the best interests of our community. If you are not using an ad blocker but are still receiving this message, make sure your browser's tracking protection is set to the 'standard' level.

Strategies & Market Trends : Gorilla and King Portfolio Candidates -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Rick who wrote (15438)	1/17/2000 7:40:00 PM
From: Thomas Mercer-Hursh	Respond to of 54805

They describe a chip that could run software not just written specifically for itself but for any other microprocessor such as Intel's Pentium or Sun's SPARC. This is not really new technology, although embedding it all into a limited amount of silicon may be. Back in about 1970 Burroughs had a system called the B1700 which used a sort of RISC or microcode processor and a series of compilers that would emulate different virtual machines. I.e., if one wrote a COBOL program, the COBOL compiler compiled it into a pseudo-instruction set which was basically an assembler specifically tailored for executing COBOL (like that on the B3500). At run-time, these pseudo-instructions were converted to the micro-instructions through some kind of hardware mapping, of which I don't recall the details. The result was that one could have multiple languages executing simultaneously, each thinking it was on a machine designed specifically for that technology. It was very interesting and worked pretty well, but never caught on very well, in part because the reps didn't seem to understand what they were selling.

To: Rick who wrote (15438)	1/17/2000 9:04:00 PM
From: LindyBill	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 54805

They describe a chip that could run software not just written specifically for itself but for any other microprocessor such as Intel's Pentium or Sun's SPARC. Crusoe's versatility apparently comes because it is pre-programmed with "code-morphing" software, a sort of translator. Sounds like the hardware version of Java. If it is, It will have the same drawback, it must translate everything first. This makes it generically slower than chips that don't translate, as Java is generically slower than the software it translates.