CPU/Hardware optimized for Erlang

[Will Newton]

On Friday 22 July 2005 13:25, Thomas Lindgren wrote:

> Even so, you will probably have to build an ASIC at
> best, while Intel puts 400 people to hand-optimizing
> the circuitry on the next x86 ... (they will thus
> likely have a big clock speed advantage too).
>
> (And why would the erlang chip have comparable
> performance at lower power?)

I'm currently working with a chip that has several hardware "threads". On a 
single piece of code it's performance is not great, but when you have 2 or 
more threads it's performance per watt can be quite impressive.

Also bear in mind that Intel chips are constrained very much by their legacy. 
If you have a specific load (e.g. floating point, integer, I/O, DSP, highly 
concurrent) it is not that difficult to build a chip that is faster than a 
more general purpose processor.

At present it doesn't run Erlang however. :-)