[ILUG] [ getting OT] SMP & powersaving - java on a sparc

[John P. Looney]

On Fri, Jan 07, 2000 at 11:35:22AM -0000, Shane Dempsey mentioned:
> Ah , its all clear now.
> Any chance of the next INTEL processors being more
> SMP friendly ? Seems a shame to make the same mistakes
> again and again ...

 Intel added "I/O APICs" to Pentium90s, and ever since then, Intel chips
have been quite reasonable SMP chips. Sequent have done a lot of work down
through the years (though they must be nearly dead by now), and produced
smashing (if expensive) SMP machines with them. It's not that the chips
are hard to do, it's more that the APM and APCI spec was almost completely
written by microsoft, for Intel. This doesn't make things easy. Well, APM
was sort of started with some agreement, then each BIOS maker added their
own bits to the spec. Apparently, once they get APCI working, all will be
well.

> Also could anyone confirm / refute that the latest SPARCs
> have circuits which act like JVM's ( not fully but enough that bytecode on
> a SPARC is going to be close to native code)  I read this somewhere but I
> just
> can't remember the source.

 Didn't know that. Sun were supposed to be funding picojava chips, which
had some JVM development hardware in them, but that's all I heard.
UltraSparcII's have a huge amount of extra bits & pieces in them; it
wouldn't be surprising to find something that could accelerate a JVM,
though I'd not heard of anything specific.

> BTW xena ?   >:-))

 Heh. 

Kate

-- 
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