The Computer and the Mind

Up to a point, an instruction cache can act like a microcode memory for emulating VHLLs. The keys are for it (a) to be large enough to hold the inner loops of the interpreter, (b) to not be flushed spuriously, and (c) for the machine instructions to execute quickly compared to the cache memory cycle.

The biggest lesson that can be read from 70 years of AI research is that general methods that leverage computation are ultimately the most effective, and by a large margin.

A really interesting design was the first ARM — which was a pretty clean RISC and tidy in size. It could have been used as an emulator by wrapping it with fast instruction memory, but wasn’t. I think this was a “point of view” disconnect. It was a very good design for the purpose of its designers, and there wasn’t enough of a VHLL culture to see... See more

A very different way to look at it might be to say: well, we really want zillions of concurrent and safe processes with very fast intermessaging programmed at the highest levels — what kind of architecture would facilitate that? We certainly don’t want either “interrupts” or long latency process switching (that seems crazy to “old Parc people”. We... See more

At the beginning I said I didn't think the Alto Architecture is better than current approaches. The main reasons are the things that Alto did not have:

• No virtual memory or any memory protection


• No executive mode, to support a trusted operating system or contain untrusted code


• No virtualization capability


• No parallelism


• No caches

As a consequence of the... See more

The idea of microcode was invented by Maurice Wilkes, a great pioneer who arguably made the earliest programmable computer — the EDSAC (pace Manchester Baby). The idea depends partly on the existence of a “large enough” memory that is much faster (3–10 times) than the 1st level RAM of the computer.

A milestone happened when the fast memory for... See more

(I can tell that you know this:) The problem with trying to emulate without a separate instruction memory is that the fetches are both (a) slow from the main memory, and (b) use memory cycles that the emulated mechanism needs to use. What is wanted is to not bother main memory for the emulation routine, and to be able to execute 4, 5 or more... See more

The Alto was fabulously efficient because its approach to how its real CPU (the microcode engine) interacted with the available memory bandwidth (including the use of multiple program counters for zero overhead low-level task switching and avoiding interrupts).

Whereas the commercial CPU architectures had very poor notions of how to use memory and... See more