logoalt Hacker News

pulse7yesterday at 9:36 PM2 repliesview on HN

"code translation in hardware" microcode is called "native"


Replies

wahernyesterday at 10:11 PM

Yep. All modern Intel and AMD architectures, save maybe some Atom variants, effectively JIT compile the incoming instructions. It's part of the reason the faster-than-static Java/JVM promises never came to fruition. The goal posts moved after the mainstream chips coopted the approach, in a sense, and they continue to move as pipelines get deeper and broader and transistor count goes up.

Transmeta was a classic failure--right idea, wrong place & time.

show 1 reply
rbanffyyesterday at 10:23 PM

IBM’s microcode is really something. Not too long ago I heard about writing “millicode” as something that’s not at the microcode level, but not quite up at the ISA level.