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MIPS dying is really the end of an era. I think it was the quintessential RISC processor of the early 90's. IIRC, Windows NT was developed on a MIPS machine to
by RcouF1uZ4gsC 7y ago
MIPS dying is really the end of an era. I think it was the quintessential RISC processor of the early 90's. IIRC, Windows NT was developed on a MIPS machine to ensure that inadvertent x86 dependencies did not sneak into the code.
I remember reading a PCWorld article comparing various processors. This was the time the Pentium came out. If my memory servers, the MIPS won the overall performance crown vs Pentium, PowerPC, and Alpha AXP.
- skissane 7y ago> IIRC, Windows NT was developed on a MIPS machine to ensure that inadvertent x86 dependencies did not sneak into the code. Not MIPS. Windows NT was initially developed on a more obscure RISC architecture, Intel i860. It was later ported to MIPS though.
- simcop2387 7y agoAnd ported to DEC Alpha too! It's one of my weirdly favorite ports of NT just because of how little use I believe it ever actually got.
- pavlov 7y agoI’m pretty sure the PowerPC port of Windows NT was the least used. It was the first to be discontinued, at least.
- toast0 7y agoThe Alpha port made it through to early release candidates of Windows 2000, and somebody is using it, because there were PuTTY builds for it.
- vetrom 7y agoI've seen live Alpha installations of windows NT driving RIPs at large format printing shops in the 90s. It was also not unheard of at VMS shops.
- neverartful 7y agoAh! The fabled Intel i860. I remember the massive amount of hype at its debut. It was touted as "Cray on a chip". I got to play with an Intel iPSC supercomputer in our Physics lab (at university) that used the i860. We had a Sun box that hosted cross-compilers for it and allowed you to reserve a specific number of i860 processors for you. The number had to be a power of 2. Fun times!
- mobilio 7y agoEven Microsoft make Jazz: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jazz_(computer) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jazz_(computer) to develop NT.