29 Jan
1999
29 Jan
'99
2:53 p.m.
You wrote...
Wouldn't that be an awfully handy feature for doing a context switch? It
would seem simply adjusting WP would perform the appropriate "change of
personality" to select the next user/process...
Jay
> WP... workspace pointer. back when the 9900 was
new registers (memory)
> really ate up chip space and TI had an archetecture in the 990
minicomputer
> where register were in memory instead of in the
CPU. So the WP is a
pointer
that points to
a block of 16 locations in ram that are addressed in
instructions as R0 through R15.
Wow! What a cool architecture! That would be a very handy feature to
have in any processor. 
29 Jan
29 Jan
3:27 p.m.
Jay West wrote:
Wouldn't that be an awfully handy feature for doing a context switch? It
would seem simply adjusting WP would perform the appropriate "change of
personality" to select the next user/process...
Exactly, but the down side was the access time to the registers, they
were all memory accesses and no cache in those days.
_---_--__-_-_----__-_----_-__-__-_-___--_-__--___-__----__--_--__-___-
Hans B Pufal Comprehensive Computer Catalogue
<mailto:hansp@digiweb.com> <http://digiweb.com/~hansp/ccc>
> WP...
workspace pointer. back when the 9900 was new registers (memory)
> really ate up chip space and TI had an archetecture in the 990
minicomputer
> where register were in memory instead of in
the CPU. So the WP is a
pointer
that
points to a block of 16 locations in ram that are addressed in
instructions as R0 through R15.
Wow! What a cool architecture! That would be a very handy feature to
have in any processor.
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