Re: [gentoo-user] Microcode update AMD

[Enrico Weigelt]

* Volker Armin Hemmann <volkerarmin@××××××××××.com> wrote:

> the CPU. All CPUs use microcode. For decades. Google, or go straight to
> wikipedia.
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microcode

Borroughs' large systems (b6500+) were designed as microcode
machines from ground up, which essentially interpreted an algol
bytecode (the whole OS was directly implemented in assembler,
w/o any machine specific assembler code). Paired w/ their entirely
stack-based architecture (there were no program-visible registers)
they could easily do massive-multiprocessing (everything's reentrant
by design), 24/7 uptime even w/ hw replacements/upgrades and
cpu improvements w/o ever having to recompile.

Their successors (now Unisys) are called emode machines - quite
the same approach as nowadays w/ Java (interpreter/JIT).


BTW: I'm currently designing an emode/microcode-base computer
architecture built on an matrix of nanocores, they don't have a
concept of main memory, instead a relatively large (linear
addressable) register memory, part of the register space is
shared with neighbours (multiport-RAMs). These are programmed
by an horizontal microcode, which is decoded by an static demux,
that directly connects registers to an micro-ALU (so there're
no additional load+store cycles) ...


cu
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 Enrico Weigelt, metux IT service -- http://www.metux.de/

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