Optimizing Intel EPIC/Itanium2 Architecture for Forth

Forth is a stack machine that represents a good match for the register stack of the Explicit Parallel Instruction Computer (EPIC) architecture. In this paper we will introduce a new calling mechanism using the register stack to implement a Forth system more efficiently. Based upon our performance measurements, we will show that the new calling mechanism is a promising technique to improve the performance of stack-based interpretative languages such as Forth. The limitation in EPIC’s Register Stack Engine makes the need for hardware support to improve performance and possibly close the efficiency gap with specialized stack processors. We will define also an adjustment to Itanium 2 processor’s instruction set to accommodate the new calling mechanism and present a conservative architectural implementation over the current Itanium 2 processor’s pipeline.