I've heard of that design too. It was back in the late 70'r or early 80's. A quick search leads to Apollo, but I seem to recall others trying the same. Onyx and Dual systems come to mind. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apollo_Computer
On Sat, Jul 4, 2015 at 12:33 PM, Mouse <mo...@rodents-montreal.org> wrote: > > The problems revolve around the fact that instructions cannot be > > properly restarted on the 68000. Not enough context is saved. > > [...] > > (The tricks done by those who did fix this consists of having a > > second processor which gets interrupted when you get a page fault, > > and the second processor do all the work related to the page fault, > > while the primary processor just stalls until the memory is > > available, at which point it can continue. There is no limits to how > > long the CPU can wait for memory to return data on a read.) > > I recall hearing of a company that build a machine with two 68000s, one > running one instruction behind the other. When the leading processor > got a page fault, hardware interrupted the lagging processor (which had > not yet encountered the faulting instruction) and there's a dance where > the two processors switch roles, allowing useful page faults. > > Perhaps such a thing existed. Perhaps my informant was misled - it > sounds like a plausible corruption of what you describe. Perhaps my > own memory has bitrotted. But it sounds to me as though it certainly > _could_ work. > > /~\ The ASCII Mouse > \ / Ribbon Campaign > X Against HTML mo...@rodents-montreal.org > / \ Email! 7D C8 61 52 5D E7 2D 39 4E F1 31 3E E8 B3 27 4B >