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Next Generation Stack Computing

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the cpu-of-the-fuuuuture dept.

mymanfryday writes "It seems that stack computers might be the next big thing. Expert Eric Laforest talks about stack computers and why they are better than register-based computers. Apparently NASA uses stack computers in some of their probes. He also claims that a kernel would only be a few kilobytes large! I wonder if Windows will be supported on a stack computer in the future?"

2 of 347 comments (clear)

  1. wikipedia link by whitelines · · Score: 5, Informative

    I didn't know either:
    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stack_machines

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  2. Stop Hurting My Eyes by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Informative

    Dear Slashdot Contributors,

    Please stop describing undergrads doing independent studies as "Experts". Theres a reason that mainstream processors haven't picked up on "Stack Processors", and it has nothing to do with binary compatibility, the difficulty of writing a compiler for their instruction set, or general programming complexity. Stack Machines are really only good for In-Order processing. Wonder why NASA probes have Stack Processors? Because they don't freaking need to do out of order processing in order to get the performance they require, and they probably found stack processors to have a favorable power / performance ratio for their application. You will never see a full blown Windows running on a Stack processor, because Superscalar processors destroy their performance.

    "My research project shows that some people wrote nifty papers in the 1970s, but everyone ignored them for an obvious reason I don't understand." -> Not an Expert