RE: Flame Linus to a crisp!

Downing, Thomas
2003-04-25T12:45:05Z

From: John Bradford [mailto:john@grabjohn.com]

>> > I'd like to see an x86 completely in perf board. I thought my high
>> > school digital electronics type stuff looked bad...
>>
>> You could do it nowadays using dynamic binary translation, and an
>> absurdly simple CPU capable of accessing a large memory. You'd need a
>> DIMM for the large memory, but get away with discrete logic for the
>> CPU if you really wanted to.
>>
>> At perf board sizes using discrete logic, expect it run run quite slow :)
>
> Could we not take this idea to it's logical extreme, and simply
> calculate the results of every opcode, on every value, for every state
> of all of the registers, and store them in an array of DIMMs, and
> simply look up the necessary results? I.E. a cpu which is one _huge_
> look up table :-).
>
> John.

NOW your'e talking! Alan Turing meets Julian Barbour.