21 Oct
2006
21 Oct
'06
9:42 a.m.
On 21 Oct 2006 at 12:07, Ray Arachelian wrote:
Stack based machines can be very fast, and depending
on their design
much faster than IA32/IA64. The idea is to use the stack instead of
registers, or as registers, and to have a large stack. Most of the
stack lives in L1 cache, and is almost as fast as a large RISC register
file.
...and at some point, the stack overlows the L1 cache and degrades to
memory-to-memory speed, no?
While it's true that stack-based architectures can provide a lot of
bang-for-the-buck, like single-accumulator machines, it's difficult
to leverage parallelsim to improve performance.
I'd venture that it's awfully difficult to design a stack machine
that can compete with a 3-address architecture with a large register
file, multiple pipelined functional units and instruction scheduling.
Would you consider the Burroughs B5000 to be a stack machine?
Cheers,
Chuck