Why not hardwire software onto CPU chips for improved efficiency?

[BicycleTree]

Well, you would break the string into blocks of characters, maybe 30 or so characters each. 30 or fewer characters and it would be time 1, 31-60 characters and it would be time 2, and so on. Not constant time except for small strings but much faster than with standard instructions.

The advantage of specialized instructions would be of about the same type as the advantage of many parallel processors.

 

[chroot]

So then we can just divide it into optimal steps that each are 100 times faster than the original. Since each step is 100 times faster then the total result will be 100 times faster. The point is to make it optimal, not to make it as slow as possible to support your view.

You apparently did not read my previous posts. You cannot simply stuff a chip with hundreds of instructions dedicated to hundreds of different specialized functions; the resulting chip would be enormous, expensive, and slow.

You do not seem to grasp the engineering trade-off in play here: a more complicated control path cannot run faster than a simpler one.

- Warren

 

[Bjørn Bæverfjord]

You apparently did not read my previous posts. You cannot simply stuff a chip with hundreds of instructions dedicated to hundreds of different specialized functions; the resulting chip would be enormous, expensive, and slow.

I read your post and what you wrote was completely wrong. The Pentium 4 has many hundred instructions many of which are useless. The simple act of removing the things that are never used and changing the remaining instructions so they do the things that a specific program needs most will result in a large speed increase. There will be a simpler control path and each instruction will do more useful work.

As I said before the point was to make an optimal solution, not to be incompetent just to win an argument.

 

[chroot]

I read your post and what you wrote was completely wrong. The Pentium 4 has many hundred instructions many of which are useless.

This is the single stupidest thing I've ever heard. The P4 only has ~250 instructions in the first place, so you're saying 80% of the are "useless?" Do you have any idea how carefully instruction sets are selected, and how much communication there is between compiler designers (i.e. Microsoft) and the teams which design the processors?

The simple act of removing the things that are never used and changing the remaining instructions so they do the things that a specific program needs most will result in a large speed increase. There will be a simpler control path and each instruction will do more useful work.

WOW! What a concept! Let's call it, I don't know... RISC! What makes your post particularly entertaining, Bjørn, is that you began by arguing that CPUs should have more instructions for directly supporting languages like BASIC, but have now completely reversed your position and now support RISC architectures. Bravo! Great show!

- Warren

 

[master_coda]

I read your post and what you wrote was completely wrong. The Pentium 4 has many hundred instructions many of which are useless. The simple act of removing the things that are never used and changing the remaining instructions so they do the things that a specific program needs most will result in a large speed increase. There will be a simpler control path and each instruction will do more useful work.

As I said before the point was to make an optimal solution, not to be incompetent just to win an argument.

You're assuming that the new instructions you add are not going to increase the complexity more than the instructions you just removed. That's a very poor assumption.