Re: Flame Linus to a crisp!

Jamie Lokier
2003-04-24T08:19:35Z

John Bradford wrote:
> With open hardware designs, there would be no problem with
> documentation not being available to write drivers.

See below...

> Incidently, using the Transmeta CPUs, is it not possible for the user
> to replace the controlling software with their own code? I.E. not
> bother with X86 compatibility at all, but effectively design your own
> CPU? Couldn't we make the first Lin-PU this way?

In theory; in practice we have no access to documentation. See above...

That makes Transmeta part of the _old_ industry :)

I believe present Transmeta CPUs are quite specialised for x86
behaviour (memory model etc.) anyway. When you're running on a CPU
like that, there's probably little to be gained from changing to a
different front-end instruction set.

Special tricks like non-cache-ping-ponging locks and faster interrupt
handling might improve performance, but probably require a change of
the hardware to implement.

-- Jamie