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Offline matthey

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Re: Assembly future
« on: October 27, 2011, 06:09:15 PM »
The Natami is attempting to develop the 68k further with ColdFire additions and other improvements in a fpga for now. There is a lot of talented 68k assembly programmers helping with the project and some interesting reading...

http://www.natami.net/

If you just look at the desktop then everything but x86 is dead but it may be that it's the desktop that is dying ;). 68k (including ColdFire and Fido) are mostly used in embedded systems. The StarCore DSP has some similarities to 68k.

Most newer processors have been RISC but they need lots of memory. The more energy efficient RISC processors have come back to a CISC encoding with a RISC core. That's what the 68060 was 17 years ago. It makes more sense to start with a high code density CISC (68k) processor and make improvements than trying to turn a RISC processor with RISC encoding (e.g. ARM) into a RISC processor with CISC encoding. The 68k is much easier to program too. My point is that the 68k fell out of style rather than became completely outdated. That means a comeback is a possibility.
 

Offline matthey

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Re: Assembly future
« Reply #1 on: October 27, 2011, 08:43:09 PM »
Quote from: Piru;665364
This assessment only applies if writing assembly code would be a requirement (in today's world it really isn't). Which means that any kind of 68k comeback is highly unlikely.


Of course writing assembly code is not a requirement. Another myth created around the time of RISC is that compilers would get better and better and assembly would become obsolete. What I see though, is many compilers generating worse code or having trouble utilizing the countless optimization techniques they advertise. Many times they can't do basic optimizations correctly. GCC is one of the worst. It's degenerated in speed and code density since version 2. Have you looked at the code that newer versions of GCC generates? Oh yea, probably not since PowerPC assembler code is tedious instead of fun. Remember how much easier debugging and looking at how optimized code was at a glance? Not that PowerPC is bad but readable assembler is almost totally discounted when it's actually very valuable.
 

Offline matthey

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Re: Assembly future
« Reply #2 on: October 27, 2011, 10:44:58 PM »
Quote from: Zac67;665412
Everything CISC is dead.


x86 too? While the desktop is dying, I wouldn't say it's dead. It will probably be like the land lines for residential phones where it will lose market share up to a certain point and then mostly stops. If you mean CISC cores are dead, then you are correct. The share of CISC instruction sets with RISC cores is the largest category and on the rise with ARM+Thumb2 and x86. Every RISC instruction set with RISC core processor I can think of is losing market share. Do you know of any gaining market share? I think a 68k+ is easier to program and can have better code density than ARM+Thumb2 and x86. I think it would be competitive and offer advantages if scaled up to todays current technology.