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From: jkenton@pinocchio.encore.com (Jeff Kenton)
Newsgroups: comp.arch
Subject: Re: speculative execution
Message-ID: <12905@encore.Encore.COM>
Date: 10 Oct 90 11:48:06 GMT
References: <1990Oct9.212103.363@rice.edu>
Sender: news@Encore.COM
Lines: 20

From article <1990Oct9.212103.363@rice.edu>, by preston@titan.rice.edu (Preston Briggs):
> 
> In general, we need to be careful about fatally increasing
> register pressure.  The i860's exposed pipeline provides an
> elegant way out, allowing simple aborts of optimistic 
> computations by ignoring what's partially computed in
> the pipe.
> 

It would take a lot to convince me that the i860 is an elegant solution
to anything.  No one has produced a compiler which can take advantage of
the theoretically possible parallelism of the i860.  It's a very fast
chip for certain kinds of applications, but I wouldn't call it elegant,
or general purpose.


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