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Strategies & Market Trends : Steve's Channelling Thread -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Steve Lee who wrote (4480)	8/18/2000 10:12:43 AM
From: Scumbria	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 30051

Steve, Emulation is the process of translating every instruction each time it is executed by the CPU. PIII and Athlon have a RISC core, and do the emulation in hardware, i.e. the instructions in the cache are non-native x86 instructions and must be translated every time the instruction is executed. PIV uses a new technique called a trace cache, which contains the translated instructions and requires that an instruction is only translated only once (ideally.) Transmeta is using a run time software re-compilation technique which effectively accomplishes the same thing as PIV (i.e. translated instructions are held in the cache.) The PRO for Transmeta is that they can have reasonable performance using simple, low power hardware. The CON is that there are inefficiencies which reduce performance. PIII and Athlon offer the simplest and most efficient technique, but it requires extra power consumption. The deep pipeline of PIV requires the trace cache to minimize the branch mispredict penalty of it's very deep pipeline. Scumbria