5 Aug
2006
5 Aug
'06
7:14 p.m.
On 8/5/2006 at 9:49 PM Ray Arachelian wrote:
Some CPU's are a pleasure to write in assembly for.
These include the
6502's, the Motorla 68000, and SPARC's. Some are a horrible nightmare:
the intel chip for example, and to a far far lesser degree, MIPS. It's
all a matter of "taste" and experience. But if you want to code for
Intel, I highly recommend that you don't look at 68000 code or SPARC code.
Because once you see how easy those are when compared to Intel, you'll
want to cry that you now have to code in Intel assembly. :-)
Oh, some Intel chips are worse than others. Basically on the x86 family,
it helps if you realize that they're all based on the 8008 with eveything
just tacked on. Sort of like a house with 80 rooms that started out as a
one-room shack.
i860 is perhaps one of the most difficult Intel chips to hand-code for,
simply for remembering all of the pipelining rules. If you can write a
well-scheduled piece of code, the 860 could really fly. Unfortunately,
that seemed to be observed more as the exception than the rule. The 432
may be more difficult, but I've never had the (dis)pleasure of coding for
one.
I think it's a little ironic now that Motorola has a cellphone out with the
i860 appellation.
Cheers,
Chuck