The “high-level CPU” challenge (2008)
Author here. I think today that apart from making my case in a bit of an obnoxious tone, I also somewhat overstated it: while it's true that many "high-level" constructs do have a cost that will not magically go away due to any logic built into hardware, at least not fully, it is also ought to be true that a lot can be done in hardware to make software's life easier given a particular HLL programming model, and I'm hardly an expert on this. My true interests are in accelerator development so starting at the GPU and further away from the CPU and so lower level and gnarlier than C in terms of programming model.<p>I will however say that the Reduceron and in general the idea of doing FP in hardware in the most direct way are a terrible waste of resources and I'm pretty sure it loses to a good compiler targeting a von Neumann machine on overall efficiency.<p>The way to go is not make a hardware interpeter, that is no better than a processor with a for loop instruction added to better support C. The trick is to carefully partition sw and hw responsibilities as in the model to which C+Unix/RISC+MMU converged to.