I was always on Team Psion, and I still miss the foldable-with-keyboard form factor today. It seems perfect, but despite one failed attempt from Planet Computers, no longer exists in any useful product.
Why? The word "hobbit" predates Tolkien and was used in a variety of ways. It might seem pedantic, but while the use of old words is one thing, there is a trend as of late whereby authors who popularize old words then claim ownership. Tolkien is beyond this but others such as the Potter franchise are not (Padfoot).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hobbit_(unit) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hobbit_(word)
https://www.inverse.com/input/features/fax-on-the-beach-the-...
Was never able to get the device working (I have two) but I still have them in my possession. So I have some of the few Hobbit microprocessors in the wild.
ARM seems to have worked out pretty well.
Ewwww
This sounds like something from the 70s and not like a new architecture for a mid-1990s microprocessor - and indeed the 70s seems to be where the design actually came from.
OTOH, LISP stack-based machines were fairly successful in their day.
So maybe TSMC shall learn something from history and not rely only on Apple for some processes.
The LLVM uses a register machine with an unlimited number of once use registers. The Hobbit could easily run LLVM programs with no change to the number of registers used. Compiling as to reuse registers would only decrease the amount of stack memory traffic.
The stack cache is effectively a form of register window. The ISA could have or might have (I don't recall) short form instructions that take shorter offsets from the top of the stack which would be similar in performance to register-to-register operations.