Accelerator boards - no future? Bad business?

[Swift Griggs]

On Fri, 22 Apr 2016, Sean Conner wrote:

> One major problem with adding a faster CPU to an SGI is the MIPS chip
> itself---code compiled for one MIPS CPU (say, the R3000) won't run on
> another MIPS CPU (say, the R4400) due to the differences in the pipeline. 

Oh and you are so totally correct. I forgot about that, but yes, it's all
coming back now. I remember reading about that in some MIPSPro C
documentation. Well darn. There goes my dream :-0 

I guess I could still posit that some advanced form of dynamic translation
would be able to do it, but that sounds extremely daunting. 

> MIPS compilers were specific for a chip because such details were not
> hidden in the CPU itself, but left to the compiler to deal with.

Ugh. That doesn't sound like such a great idea, but what do I know. That's a
very weird intersection of hardware and software that I couldn't begin to
unravel. 

-Swift