Newsgroups: comp.arch
Path: utzoo!henry
From: henry@zoo.toronto.edu (Henry Spencer)
Subject: Re: 386 Clones [really: IEEE floating point & various approaches; long]
Message-ID: <1990Nov2.173553.11796@zoo.toronto.edu>
Organization: U of Toronto Zoology
References: <1990Oct26.015244.586@amd.com> <8464@scolex.sco.COM> <42597@mips.mips.COM> <4174@goanna.cs.rmit.oz.au> <42618@mips.mips.COM> <1990Nov1.232508.18287@jarvis.csri.toronto.edu>
Date: Fri, 2 Nov 90 17:35:53 GMT

In article <1990Nov1.232508.18287@jarvis.csri.toronto.edu> jonah@dgp.toronto.edu (Jeff Lee) writes:
>...The opinion on traps was that they were
>generally more trouble than they were worth, especially if the trap
>handler overhead was any significant amount.

All the more so if you run into a situation like Mike O'Dell tells about
at Prisma, in which catching the trap drastically slows down your code
(because it demands that the trap occur at well-defined times, which a
heavily pipelined blazing-fast machine has real trouble with).
-- 
"I don't *want* to be normal!"         | Henry Spencer at U of Toronto Zoology
"Not to worry."                        |  henry@zoo.toronto.edu   utzoo!henry