Messages in this thread | | | Date | Thu, 24 Apr 2003 09:31:37 +0100 | From | Jamie Lokier <> | Subject | Re: Flame Linus to a crisp! |
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John Bradford wrote: > With open hardware designs, there would be no problem with > documentation not being available to write drivers.
See below...
> Incidently, using the Transmeta CPUs, is it not possible for the user > to replace the controlling software with their own code? I.E. not > bother with X86 compatibility at all, but effectively design your own > CPU? Couldn't we make the first Lin-PU this way?
In theory; in practice we have no access to documentation. See above...
That makes Transmeta part of the _old_ industry :)
I believe present Transmeta CPUs are quite specialised for x86 behaviour (memory model etc.) anyway. When you're running on a CPU like that, there's probably little to be gained from changing to a different front-end instruction set.
Special tricks like non-cache-ping-ponging locks and faster interrupt handling might improve performance, but probably require a change of the hardware to implement.
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