Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!crdgw1!crdos1!davidsen
From: davidsen@crdos1.crd.ge.COM (Wm E Davidsen Jr)
Newsgroups: comp.arch
Subject: Re: Compilers taking advantage of architectural enhancements
Message-ID: <2781@crdos1.crd.ge.COM>
Date: 22 Oct 90 16:45:13 GMT
References: <1990Oct9> <3300194@m.cs.uiuc.edu> <11922@ganymede.inmos.co.uk> <2661@l.cc.purdue.edu> <27089@mimsy.umd.edu>
Reply-To: davidsen@crdos1.crd.ge.com (bill davidsen)
Organization: GE Corp R&D Center, Schenectady NY
Lines: 19

In article <27089@mimsy.umd.edu> chris@mimsy.umd.edu (Chris Torek) writes:

| Hardly.  If someone builds a machine designed to run COBOL programs fast,
| I may not want to *use* it, but it is in no way an *insult*.  If company X
| thinks there is a market for such machines, and can find investors, why
| should I be insulted?

  Honeywell offered the extended instruction set (EIS box) for the
6000/DPS line, and much of the new instruction set was intended to allow
fast implementation of COBOL, such as direct hardware BCD arithmetic,
string copy and compare, etc.

  Because the address space was limited and instruction processing was
costly, this hyper-CISC was a good decision at the time. It allowed
(from memory) up to 3x speedup of COBOL programs, with about 5-10% cost
increment.
-- 
bill davidsen	(davidsen@crdos1.crd.GE.COM -or- uunet!crdgw1!crdos1!davidsen)
    VMS is a text-only adventure game. If you win you can use unix.