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To: Tenchusatsu who wrote (68537)	11/13/1998 2:11:00 PM
From: Scumbria	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 186894

Ten, <The upshot is this: sections of the patent (No. 5,832,205) discuss a chip that can translate Intel chip instructions into a more advanced format referred to as VLIW (Very Long Instruction Word). VLIW is a catch-all term for a variety of technologies that essentially combine many simple computer instructions into a single long instruction which can then be executed more efficiently and quickly than current computer code.> This looks a lot like Merced. As we all know, Merced can translate legacy x86 instructions (now known as IA-32) into the new IA-64 instructions. IA-64 is called EPIC technology (Explicitly Parallel Instruction Computing), and it similar to the VLIW technology that Transmeta seems to be pursuing. VLIW simply places a group of instructions into a predictable position for parallel decoding (and possibly parallel execution.) The reason that Merced does the x86->VLIW translation is because it has too, not because there is any performance advantage. The value of VLIW in Merced is for native IA64 compiled code. Transmeta is not doing anything to the compiler. They are simply converting each x86 instruction into a fixed set of parallel smaller instructions. I'm not sure what the value is to doing this since most x86 instructions are read-modify-write, which obviously can't be executed out of order. If all they have to offer is this idea, I won't be holding my breath waiting for TransMeta to take over the x86 world. Scumbria