Crusoe opens up a lot of interesting opportunities for future game optimization. The only reason why Quake et al. are written for x86, PPC, etc. is that these chip architectures are the only ones available currently. No one (that I know of) has specifically designed an instruction set that is tailored toward being game-optimized. Maybe the x86 instruction set is not really optimized for games and is really horrible from the hardware angle. With Crusoe, you could define your own game-specific instruction set (with the appropriate translations defined on the Crusoe-side.)
I can just imagine it now... an Open Source instruction set for a virtual processor running only on Crusoe (under Linux of course.)
My only question here is whether or not the instruction set that the game/application is compiled against makes a large difference in the ultimate performance. My guess is that having a specific instruction set that is designed specifically for a given purpose (i.e. fast games) would boost performance tremendously.
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I can just imagine it now... an Open Source instruction set for a virtual processor running only on Crusoe (under Linux of course.)
My only question here is whether or not the instruction set that the game/application is compiled against makes a large difference in the ultimate performance. My guess is that having a specific instruction set that is designed specifically for a given purpose (i.e. fast games) would boost performance tremendously.
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