Gavin Scott wrote:


> John writes:
> > The one point in Wirt's proposal with which I will disagree at
> > this time is the notion that the emulation should be developed for
> > the 32-bit Intel 80x86 chip, and only later moved to IA-64.
>
> The problem is the relative "size" of the architectures.  IA-32 is
"smaller"
> in terms of registers and other resources than PA-RISC is, and this will
> have an effect on emulator design and performance.  The big advantage of
> IA-32 is that it is ubiquitous and if you want to get something into a lot
> of people's hands quickly and cheaply, then IA-32 is the way to go.

That's not the only problem.  IA-32 is little-endian, which means a painful
amount of byte-swapping would go on.  That would always make it really slow.

The IA64 is bi-endian, I'm pretty sure, which would help a lot.

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