On Thursday 10 November 2005 14:02, Jerry Feldman wrote:
On Thursday 10 November 2005 12:08 am, Steven T. Hatton wrote:
What I was taught in my course on hardware in college years ago is that some compilers on "RISC" processors skipped assembler, and wrote in a more cryptic instruction set which was virtually impossible for a human to make sense of. The assembler instructions for such systems is written as a "higher level" language.
Most modern compilers generate their code directly rather than calling the assembler.
This is true, but I suspect Steven is talkiing about microcode. Microcode is the stuff the CPU really understands, and assembly (or machine language, which is a one-to-one translation of assembly code, not counting the administrative stuff, and the occasional macro) gets translated to microcode on the fly. This is true for most modern platforms, and especially for AMD. I'm told AMD actually implements the Intel compatibility on top of their native microcode I'd love to see a linux version written directly to the native AMD core :)