Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!husc6!uwvax!pipe!peng From: peng@pipe.cs.wisc.edu (Chih-Jui Peng) Newsgroups: comp.lang.lisp Subject: Question about Symbolic's Ivory chip Message-ID: <5924@spool.cs.wisc.edu> Date: 6 Jul 88 21:15:51 GMT Sender: news@spool.cs.wisc.edu Reply-To: peng@pipe.cs.wisc.edu (Chih-Jui Peng) Distribution: na Organization: U of Wisconson - Madison Lines: 11 I recently read an article on Computer Design about the Symbolic's Ivory chip. It says there is a 32-word scratchpad on the chip "that contains a duplicate of the top word on the stack in a fixed location". Can somebody tell me what exactly this means? In particular, there is also a 128-word top-of-stack cache on chip, I am really curious why the top-of-stack is organized in this way and what is the difference between these two mechanisms? Thanks and hope this is the right place to ask this question. Chih-Jui Peng peng@pipe.cs.wisc.edu