[rescue] sparc10 cpu - what to do.

[John Hudak]

hi Dave:
Still a requirement in my book!
I once interviewed ppl for  a sw engr position for RTE application.  One
person was very proud of their position that they had to know *very little*
about the actual hardware (e.g. the machine) that they were dealing with.
He was well enamored with his ability to 'make his C code do anything and
not be concerned about HW 'details'....after giving him enough hints that
knowing some hw detail was *really* important for this application, he did
not take the hint.  His abstraction level was permanently fixed on I can
make C do anything...After a bit more discussion, I politely ended the
interview, and put his resume in the circular file.
J



On Tue, Dec 20, 2016 at 1:31 PM, Dave McGuire <mcguire at neurotica.com> wrote:

> On 12/20/2016 01:29 PM, Mouse wrote:
> >> I've wondered what kind of performance boost we could get if we ran
> >> directly at the microcode layer (the one that pretends it's this
> >> obsolete junk).
> >
> > Significant, probably, but also hellishly complicated to do anything
> > useful with.  Risky, too; microcode tends to allow things like gating
> > more than one internal register onto an internal data bus at the same
> > time.  And probably strictly Harvard, rather than von Neumann.
> >
> > And very, very processor-rev-specific.
>
>   That would very quickly bring back the now-obsolete requirement that
> programmers actually know what they're doing. ;)
>
>                -Dave
>
> --
> Dave McGuire, AK4HZ
> New Kensington, PA
> _______________________________________________
> rescue list - http://www.sunhelp.org/mailman/listinfo/rescue