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by James Robertson.
Original Post: Microprocessor enhancements
Feed Title: Richard Demers Blog
Feed URL: http://www.cincomsmalltalk.com/rssBlog/rademers-rss.xml
Feed Description: Richard Demers on Smalltalk
In Longhorn hype continues apace, James complains about Windows graphics being in the kernel. To which Ziv Capsi from Microsoft responded, "Because people care about performance. No. What's right for you isn't necessarily right for others." And James replied, "Get the guys at Intel to come up with something to speed this up without causing crashes."
Does James' reply seem unrealistic? Well it shouldn't. There is precedent in augmenting a system's microprocessor to provide high performance for important operating system features. I'm talking about the enhancements IBM made to the 64-bit PowerPC microprocessor in their iSeries (a.k.a. AS/400) computers to support OS/400's high-level machine architecture. This included 22 additional processor instructions and main memory support for tagged pointers (part of its single-level memory management system). For more on all this, check out this article.
Meanwhile, IBM keeps this gem of a system hidden in obscurity, while it actively markets whatever it thinks will sell. Go figure.
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