Re: Minutes from Feb 21 LSE Call

[Martin J. Bligh]

>> And the baroque instruction encoding on the x86 is actually a _good_
>> thing: it's a rather dense encoding, which means that you win on icache. 
>> It's a bit hard to decode, but who cares? Existing chips do well at
>> decoding, and thanks to the icache win they tend to perform better - and
>> they load faster too (which is important - you can make your CPU have
>> big caches, but _nothing_ saves you from the cold-cache costs). 
> 
> Next step: hardware gzip ?

They did that already ... IBM were demonstrating such a thing a couple of
years ago. Don't see it helping with icache though, as it unpacks between
memory and the processory, IIRC.

M.