[Openmcl-devel] Thoughts? OpenMCL on ARM processors?

[Phil]

In asking the question, why not go a step further:  has any thought  
been given to using something along the lines of LLVM as a potential  
future platform?  Would this even make sense for Clozure CL at some  
level?  I ask because I got very interested in this topic after  
reading about how much it looks like Apple is beginning to do with  
this in the excellent ARS Leopard review.

Thanks,
Phil

On Oct 30, 2007, at 5:51 PM, Rainer Joswig wrote:

> Hi,
>
>   I'm a bit curious to hear if anybody has thoughts about this topic.
>
> ARM processors are extremely widely used. They offer RISC design with
> a low-power implementation.
>
> As I understand the iPhone and the iPod touch are both ARM-based and
> they are running
> a customized version of OSX. Apple is currently not providing a
> software development kit,
> but has announced that there will be some form of SDK starting in
> February next year.
> People have been able to write software for these devices, which
> currently is not
> wanted by Apple.
>
> Both devices have 128MB RAM and a minimum of 8GB flash based disk.
>
> AFAIK no popular native code compiling Common Lisp can compile to ARM
> instructions.
>
> Maybe Gary has an opinion about this? How different would a backend
> for the ARM
> processor (say, similar to those used in the iPhone and iPod touch) be
> from the
> 32bit PPC backend? Would it be easier or more difficult than a 32bit
> Intel backend?
>
> CCL, MACL, ... were running in very little memory years ago. Wouldn't
> it be
> a good starting point for a native code compiler for ARM-based OSX
> machines?
>
> It is unknown how much future ARM processors will have in mobile
> Apple computers, since it might be possible that Intel will have
> useful low-power x86 machines. But it seems that the infrastructure
> for low-power ARM-based devices is quite good right now and
> Apple has two devices that will be sold in large quantities.
>
> Does anybody has spare cycles to comment on this?
>
> Regards,
>
> Rainer Joswig
>
>
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