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has anyone ever developed on a non-intel machine with asm code? or something simliar?

just wondering
thanks
Alan

sparc*

heh sorry

i only have a little experience of disassembling code on such a machine, but not of "hand-written" assembly

I have seen Assembler code for Motorola 68k series CPUs(Apple PCs), as well as for SGI MIPS. That(SGI MIPS) assembler looks very wierd - like:

add r0, r10, r3
- adds register 10 with register 3 and puts it into register 0.

An SGI MIPS R3000(Playstation's CPU) is 32-bit, w/32 registers, plus 32 more registers for floating point operations, at which they excel... And then there's SGI MIPS R4000(N64's CPU) which is the EXACT same thing except 64-bit and with a few more instructions. Every MIPS from R4000 to R14000 are 64-bit and are capable of 1024 CPUs per system. Current SGI MIPS R14000 is 500MHz, but executes 2 instructions/clk pulse/exec unit, with 2 execution units. An SGI MIPS R14000 @ 500MHz is like a P4 @ 2GHz.

I don't really know that much about the Sun SPARC(Note spelling - had to rub it in ::)). There's MicroSPARC, SPARC, SPARC II, UltraSPARC, and HyperSPARC. What I know about these things is that I'm pretty sure that the HyperSPARC has an 8MByte Cache.

I don't really know that much about the Motorola 68k, except that it's used in Apples and the newest ones released are more than 2 times faster than the Intel chips at the same MHz (An Apple G4 @ 400MHz is about as fast as a Pentium III @ 900MHz.

...And now this is Intel, but it's what a Windows CE based Palmtop uses - The StrongARM. This is supposed to be very similar to x86 systems, but with a little less instructions and with the ability to greatly save power usage! For example: If you are copying a byte from here to there, the StrongARM will shut off it's ALU(Arithmetic Logic Unit). The ALU is a big part of the CPU(add, sub, mul, div, shl, shr, fadd, fsub, fmul, etc...), so it saves lots of power.

I have never actually developed on these machines or even used them (Used an iMac for about 2 minutes), so I don't know... I thought this technical information would be useful.

Warmaster199 wrote: I don't really know that much about the Motorola 68k, except that it's used in Apples and the newest ones released are more than 2 times faster than the Intel chips at the same MHz (An Apple G4 @ 400MHz is about as fast as a Pentium III @ 900MHz.

Actually, the 68K series was only in older Macs; starting with the PowerMac 6100 in 1994, they've been using another Motorola chip, a RISC design called PowerPC (based on the POWER architecture leased from IBM). The G4 is the most recent of that line.

When Apple transitioned from one to the other, they set up a 68040 emulator in the System ROM. The 60 MHz PPC 601 was so fast that it emulated the older design at about the equivalent of 25 MHz clock speed, IIRC, which was fairly fast by Mac standards at the time; native code was said to run at speeds comparable to the 100Mhz Pentiums which were it's contemporaries.

I bring this up mainly because a similar transition may be approaching for the x86 line in the next two or three years, and the question of backwards compatibility vs. emulation has already come up at least once. I thought that the comparison might be of some help.

You are talking about the IA-64 chip, correct? I am pretty sure that Intel was wanting to provide backwards compatibility. It will make the chip more expensive, but it will run the 'old' x86 design at the same speed as the CPU clock, rather than emulate it at 1/3rd of the clock speed.

AMD is releasing a 64-bit chip pretty soon too, right?

About clock speeds? What do you thing is that maximum Hz the systems of the future will run at? The highest vibrating element in the world is Caesium(Cs). It has a frequency of something like 9 quadrillion Hz (9PetaHz) - I think that'll be the max...

Onto the original question of this thread:

has anyone ever developed on a non-intel machine with asm code? or something simliar?

has anyone ever developed on a non-intel machine with asm code? or something simliar?

Yes, I'm sure lots of people have. I personally have written assembly for ARM, 6811, 8051 and others.