Re: [FWP] Re: PerlOS (offtopic --- "perl chip")

[Bennett Todd <bet@newritz.mordor.net>]

I seem to recall a couple of examples of this sort of thing; I'm pretty sure
that the inventor or maybe it was leading proponent of Forth (Moore?) was
behind a design and fab effort that led to a Forth chip, and I think Bell Labs
demonstrated a C chip or some such? And then there was an Intel thingummie
that was touted as an Ada chip. And some early mainframe, pre-mating-dinosaurs
(Burroughs?) was an Algol machine.

I'm pretty sure most computer architects would agree that you're better off
spending your transistors on making a critical handful of instructions run
unbelievably fast, and providing acres of breathtakingly quick on-chip cache;
as soon as you try and lay an HLL down into silicon you end up with poor
utilization --- little of the hardware is making stuff happen at any given
moment.

-Bennett

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