Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!cs.utexas.edu!uunet!lotus!esegue!johnl
From: johnl@esegue.segue.boston.ma.us (John R. Levine)
Newsgroups: comp.arch
Subject: Re: VLIW Architecture
Keywords: VLIW
Message-ID: <1989Oct5.025841.2046@esegue.segue.boston.ma.us>
Date: 5 Oct 89 02:58:41 GMT
References: <251FCB3F.12366@maccs.dcss.mcmaster.ca> <1050@m3.mfci.UUCP> <13050@pur-ee.UUCP> <1630@l.cc.purdue.edu>
Reply-To: johnl@esegue.segue.boston.ma.us (John R. Levine)
Organization: Segue Software, Cambridge MA
Lines: 20

In article <1630@l.cc.purdue.edu> cik@l.cc.purdue.edu (Herman Rubin) writes:
>I have seen NO language designed for the efficient use of hardware operations.
Gee, I have, albeit for specific computers, e.g.:

	Bliss-10	PDP-10
	Fortran		IBM 709

Neither was very good in the portability department, at least not in its
initial form, as befits a hardware specific language.

To return to the original argument, John Ellis' book doesn't concern itself
with specific instruction sets because at the time he wrote it, VLIWs
existed only on paper.  The concrete design of a VLIW happened only after
most of the rest of the Yale VLIW project left to build real hardware at
Multiflow.  I was at Yale at the time and the longest instruction word we
had was 36 bits in our DEC-20.  Or maybe 48 bits in a PDP-11.
-- 
John R. Levine, Segue Software, POB 349, Cambridge MA 02238, +1 617 492 3869
johnl@esegue.segue.boston.ma.us, {ima|lotus}!esegue!johnl, Levine@YALE.edu
Massachusetts has 64 licensed drivers who are over 100 years old.  -The Globe