A high-performance object-oriented memory
Craig Hyatt · ACM SIGARCH Computer Architecture News · 1993
The proposed design places a high-performance object memory in a portable peripheral that relieves the host CPU of the burden of object address translation and the constant management of live objects. This flexible approach is designed for the newest generation of high-performance workstations running 32-bit Smalltalk, Lisp, C++ and other COP (object oriented programming) environments. With a two-layer cache and 50ns DRAM object memory, the hardware is capable of accessing object data (including bounds and protection checking) in less than 20ns. Objects are allocated or freed in under 500ns using a hardware binary buddy algorithm.