{{No footnotes, date=February 2024
Virtual Processor (VP) was a
virtual machine
In computing, a virtual machine (VM) is the virtualization or emulator, emulation of a computer system. Virtual machines are based on computer architectures and provide the functionality of a physical computer. Their implementations may involve ...
from
Tao Group Tao Group may refer to one of two companies:
*Tao Group Hospitality, a restaurant and nightclub operator
*Tao Group (software)
Tao Group was a software company with headquarters in Reading, Berkshire, UK. It developed the Intent software platf ...
.
History
The first version, VP1, was the basis of its parallel processing multimedia OS and platform, TAOS. VP1 supported a
RISC
In electronics and computer science, a reduced instruction set computer (RISC) is a computer architecture designed to simplify the individual instructions given to the computer to accomplish tasks. Compared to the instructions given to a comp ...
-like instruction set with 16 32-bit registers, and had data types of 32- and 64-bit integers and 32- and 64-bit
IEEE
The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) is an American 501(c)(3) organization, 501(c)(3) public charity professional organization for electrical engineering, electronics engineering, and other related disciplines.
The IEEE ...
floating point numbers
In computing, floating-point arithmetic (FP) is arithmetic on subsets of real numbers formed by a ''significand'' (a signed sequence of a fixed number of digits in some base) multiplied by an integer power of that base.
Numbers of this form ...
in registers, and also supported 8- and 16-bit integers in memory.
The second version, VP2, was released in 1998 as the basis of a new version of the portable multimedia platform, first known as Elate and then as intent. VP2 supported the same data types and data processing operations as VP1, but had additional features for better support of high level languages such as demarcation of
subroutines
In computer programming, a function (also procedure, method, subroutine, routine, or subprogram) is a callable unit of software logic that has a well-defined interface and behavior and can be invoked multiple times.
Callable units provide a p ...
, by-value parameters, and a very large theoretical maximum number of registers local to the subroutine for use as local variables.
The structure of VPCode, the Virtual Processor's
machine code
In computer programming, machine code is computer code consisting of machine language instructions, which are used to control a computer's central processing unit (CPU). For conventional binary computers, machine code is the binaryOn nonb ...
, was intended to be able to represent the constructs required when compiling languages such as C, C++ and
Java
Java is one of the Greater Sunda Islands in Indonesia. It is bordered by the Indian Ocean to the south and the Java Sea (a part of Pacific Ocean) to the north. With a population of 156.9 million people (including Madura) in mid 2024, proje ...
, and to allow efficient translation into the machine code of any real 32- or 64-bit
CPU
A central processing unit (CPU), also called a central processor, main processor, or just processor, is the primary processor in a given computer. Its electronic circuitry executes instructions of a computer program, such as arithmetic, log ...