Re: Making Lemonade (Floating-point format changes)

BGB wrote:

>
Emulation via traps is very slow, but typical for many ISA's is to just quietly turn the soft-float operations into runtime calls.

I recall that MIPS could emulate a TLB table walk in something like
19 cycles. That is:: a few cycles to get there, a hash table access,
a check, a TLB install, and a few cycles to get back.
On an x86 this would be at least 200 cycles just getting there and back.
So, to revisit your statement::
Emulation is slow when trap overhead is large and not-slow when trap overhead
is small.