Fast Prolog with an extended general purpose architecture

Most Prolog machines have been based on specialized architectures. The authors´ goal is to start with a general-purpose architecture and determine a minimal set of extensions for high-performance Prolog execution. They have developed both the architecture and optimizing compiler simultaneously, drawing on results of previous implementations. They find that most Prolog-specific operations can be done satisfactorily in software; however, there is a crucial set of features that the architecture must support to achieve the best Prolog performance. The emphasis in this study is on the authors´ architecture and instruction set. The costs and benefits of the special architectural features and instructions are analyzed. Simulated performance results are presented and indicate a peak compiled Prolog performance of 3.68 million logical inferences per second