In <[email protected]>, on
12/29/2014
at 12:09 AM, Alan Altmark <[email protected]> said:
>When we first started using the word "microcode" I believe it was
>correct. Then we split the microcode into a burned-in part and a
>loadable part, so the word came to mean "reloadable microcode."
>Feh. It was no longer really microcode, but there wasn't a term
>for what it was. So we introduced the term "millicode". As the
>CPU architecture got more and more complex and functionally rich,
>"microcode" was left to flounder with no clear meaning.
That's not what you folks wrote when you introduced the term;
technical articles described a hierarchy of microcode, millicode and
z, with the millicode using an extended subset of the z instruction
set and the microcode using an undocumented architecture, presumably
VLIW (horizontal).
--
Shmuel (Seymour J.) Metz, SysProg and JOAT
ISO position; see <http://patriot.net/~shmuel/resume/brief.html>
We don't care. We don't have to care, we're Congress.
(S877: The Shut up and Eat Your spam act of 2003)
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