The article didn't make very clear the differences
between Soft Machines and some now quite old work by
Michael J. Flynn on universal host machine and
some work by Kemal Ebcioglu on using very long
instruction word (VLIW) on code for nearly any
instruction set.
Last I heard, Ebcioglu's execution timing
simulations were getting 9:1 speedup on IBM's 370
code via 24-way VLIW.
My favorite old idea was to find and offer some
programming language constructs that, in their
implementation, could make good use of multiple
threads without the programmer having to consider
multiple threads.
Last I heard, Ebcioglu's execution timing simulations were getting 9:1 speedup on IBM's 370 code via 24-way VLIW.
My favorite old idea was to find and offer some programming language constructs that, in their implementation, could make good use of multiple threads without the programmer having to consider multiple threads.