[pypy-dev] Of interest, eventually? (IBM opening ppc h/w design)

[Bob Ippolito]

On Apr 1, 2004, at 1:53 PM, Alex Martelli wrote:

>
> On 2004 Apr 01, at 00:07, Bengt Richter wrote:
>
>> Here is IBM's announcement:
>>
>> http://www-306.ibm.com/chips/news/2004/0331_power.html
>
> Wow.
>
>> How would pypy adapt-to/have-an-advantage-in-exploiting the existence 
>> of such a
>> configurable h/w platform?
>>
> First of all, it seems to me, by having a generator for PPC machine 
> code -- which, it seems, was one of the things dropped from our 
> projects due to reduced funding:-(.  With PPC (in the form of plain 
> unadorned G5) pulsing at the core of supercomputers ("Big Mac" at 
> Virginia Tech), IBM mainframes, Apple 1U servers, down to high-end 
> Apple PCs, and soon, probably, laptops, and also a serious contender 
> for the next generation of gaming consoles (apparently both Sony and 
> Microsoft are considering it), _and_ now even potentially "extensible" 
> in such ways, I think that if I had to nominate just one chip 
> architecture to generate machine code for it would have to be PPC (the 
> fact that I'm a recent and enthusiastic Mac owner is not really 
> related, except in stemming partly from the same reason -- I've 
> revisited PPC architecture in the wake of all the recent hoopla about 
> G5 and it appears that there _is_ a lot to like about it).  Ah well -- 
> I do realize that, with our limited resources, the near ubiquitousness 
> of the [expletive deleted] descendants of Intel 80386 makes it most 
> likely impractical and impolitical to eschew supporting their 
> bedraggled complexity in favour of PPC's clean and powerful 
> extensibility:-(.

I'm sure a PPC code generator will get done eventually, even if I have 
to do it myself on my own time :)

-bob