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| Authored by: Wol on Thursday, May 31 2012 @ 12:04 PM EDT |
Well then, as I understood (I may be wrong) the transmeta chip, added to what
you've just said, the SAME transmeta chip can be an x86, or PowerPC, or 68000 or
whatever is convenient at that particular moment! In other words, the program on
disk is not the native byte-code of the processor!
What I'm getting at is that the actual instructions that execute in hardware are
NOT the instructions that are read by the chip from memory.
In other words, the chip is an interpreter (in the case of transmeta, and indeed
many others, a programmable interpreter!) or virtual machine. It executes
non-native bytecode instructions. I used to work with Pr1me 50-series. And most
of the machines I used had extra microcode so the cpu could do BCD arithmetic -
so that the main program running on those machines (INFORMATION) could do
calculations accurately to arbitrary precision. Rather important, as it was a
database (variant of Pick) and needed to be able to store and calculate the data
accurately.
So, in defining a "virtual machine" as a system where some or all of
the instructions are executed in software, you've just described pretty much any
modern processor chip!
Cheers,
Wol[ Reply to This | Parent | # ]
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