On 21-Apr-06, at 8:39 PM, Ian Piumarta wrote:
David,
p.s. I think this power of two business is a bit over-hyped. The correct machine word size is and always has been 24 bits.
24? 24???!!! What kind of number is that?!? You can't even fit an entire file name into it (sixbit uppercase ASCII, naturally)!
Noooo.... You need 36 bits, my man. Split down the middle for those ordinary everyday tasks where 18 bit halfwords will do just fine, and in only half the resources too.
Fie on that nonsense. What y'need is 33bits. 32 for a decent size integer (who*needs* 64 bit values, anyway) and one bit for a tag. Then you need an asynchronous ARM-like architecture with the TLC (sorta WCS) and floating pint hardware connected to fullspeed mram so that there is no need for data cache. Then you have a few thousand of those in a single machine. Easy. Now gimme One Billion Euros to implement it.
tim -- tim Rowledge; tim@rowledge.org; http://www.rowledge.org/tim State-of-the-art: What we could do with enough money.