Newsgroups: comp.parallel From: Glen Clark Subject: Re: Processor States on Bus Instead of Registers Organization: Clark Communications Date: 10 Jun 1997 12:35:41 GMT Message-ID: <5njhmt$qdf@server1.ctc.com> Roger Young wrote: > Could anyone tell me what they think of putting the entire state of a > simple processor on a bus and communicating by letting the state move > between memories instead of moving data to and from registers in > parallel processors? Well now... That's a fresh idea. I didn't look at the URL, but the idea is attractive. It would require a wider buss... and there is always inertia of rest for buss structures... but it could theoretically save a lot of time at the CPU, dispensing with pushing stuff down on the stack and then popping it back off, or at least saving it to and fetching it from registers. Some logical expansions of this idea would require that the memory be also wider. In past paradigms (I hate that word because it's so over-used), the marginal cost of the wider memory would make the performance increase not cost effective. However, with memory costs at levels that were unthinkable a decade ago (and certainly when the Von Neuman paradigm was laid out), I think you could be into very interesting territory. Just one man's opinion. -- Glen Clark glen@clarkcom.com State College, PA -- Articles to parallel@ctc.com (Administrative: bigrigg@ctc.com) Archive: http://www.hensa.ac.uk/parallel/internet/usenet/comp.parallel