3 ms·
The wrong lesson seems to be "Intel tried to foist something on the market that it didn't want, and AMD listened to the public." Usually by the desktop gaming
by ethbro 8y ago
The wrong lesson seems to be "Intel tried to foist something on the market that it didn't want, and AMD listened to the public."
Usually by the desktop gaming crowd, who can't define VLIW or discuss the relative merits of different microarchitecture choices.
On (A) and (B), I'll forgive Intel (and HP). Circa-1990, I can see it being much more debatable if making hardware (ILP) or software (VLIW) smarter were a more reliable path to performance. Especially with the market being smaller & more centralized (commercial compilers galore!).
I mean, hell, AMD made the same wrong call circa-2011 in their GPU arch, no? Thus one of the reasons they ceded ML to the simpler SIMD design Nvida used which was more amenable to creating, e.g., something like CUDA? (correct me if I'm wrong)
On (C), my impression was that bank switching and PAE were poorly supported by Windows at the desktop level. Which essentially made it a non-starter for the primary computer market at the time.
- beagle3 8y agoI don't think that lesson is wrong. I was involved with the semiconductor industry at the time, and that's how it looked from the inside (and it still does in retrospect). AMD/ATI in 2011 was still focused on graphics, ignoring the GPGPU revolution (as it was still called back then). In many ways they still haven't managed to turn around. > On (C), my impression was that bank switching and PAE were poorly supported by Windows at the desktop level. Which essentially made it a non-starter for the primary computer market at the time. I remember that while PAE was clunky, it did enable (say) running multiple processes on 8-core machines and giving each its own 2GB of memory; It was definitely poor compared to the real thing (AMD64 at the time), but like EMS, XMS and similar "extended memory" systems of the late '80s before it, it was good enough to stop people from moving to a decent architecture (e.g. Motorola 680x0) if it didn't provide backward compatibility.
- ethbro 8y agoFair. On PAE, I think the 4GB memory limit on contemporary Windows desktop OSes is what I'm remembering: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Physical_Address_Extension#Microsoft_Windows https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Physical_Address_Extension#Mic...