4 ms·

Thats why I was always skeptical of the Transmeta CPUs. They could 'run' the x86 ISA as its on paper, but they'd never be able to completely match all the nuan

Thats why I was always skeptical of the Transmeta CPUs. They could 'run' the x86 ISA as its on paper, but they'd never be able to completely match all the nuances of the Intel CPUs to get 100% compatibility. The devils in the details as they say.

saagarjha 6y ago
Reimplementing an ISA is not actually an impossible feat; many companies have done so successfully before.
- VectorLock 6y ago
  Nothing is impossible, but has anybody done it since 2000 starting from scratch? AMD obviously has been at it from the start, Cyrix, VIA, NEC all did it but any since Intel CPUs started being in the tens of millions of transistors?
  - weare138 6y ago
    Hitachi SH-4 | 10M transistors | 1997 SPARC64 V | 191M transistors | 2001 DEC Alpha 21364 (EV7) | 152M transistors | 2003 SPARC64 V+ | 400M transistors | 2004 Cell | 250M transistors | 2005 POWER6 | 789M transistors | 2007 SPARC64 VI | 540M transistors | 2007 SPARC64 VIIIfx | 760M transistors | 2009 16-core SPARC T3 | 1B transistors | 2010 8-core POWER7 | 1.2B transistors | 2010 Quad-core z196 | 1.4B transistors | 2010 SPARC64 IXfx | 1.87B transistors | 2011 SPARC64 X | 2.99B transistors | 2012 8-core POWER7+ | 2.1B transistors | 2012 Apple A7 | 1B transistors | 2013 12-core POWER8 | 4.2B transistors | 2013 Apple A8 | 2B transistors | 2014 Apple A8X | 3B transistors | 2014 32-core SPARC M7 | 10B transistors | 2015 [insert a crapton of ARM CPUs here] AWS Graviton2 | 30B transistors | 2019
    - VectorLock 6y ago
      No x86 ISAs in here. All licensed designs or first party manufacturer. I wasn't saying nobody could make anything as complex as current Intel CPUs. Cloning other ISAs either from clean room or from licensed designs like ARM seems to be much easier than matching Intel CPUs with a massive breadth of software and less hard specifics at the edges.
PopeDotNinja 6y ago
I used to be skeptical of AMD CPUs & the various motherboards for a long time, too. I figured that Intel had the resources to test the crap out of my computer, and I really needed it to work.
- VectorLock 6y ago
  AMD started out and get the designs directly from Intel to make 8086 CPUs on license and continued onto the 286 until Intel broke their agreement and they had to make clean room 386 implementations. So AMD has been doing this since, essentially, the beginning, and have been able to iterate tracking Intel and not starting from scratch in the 2000s with an entirely new approach. They probably could have done it, eventually, but they ran out of funding and thats the end of the road for that adventure.
FullyFunctional 6y ago
This statement is pure FUD. There were no meaningful quality issues and the situation is exactly the same for all alternative implementations of the same ISA. You could make the same argument to say that AMD or even a new Intel microarchitecture is incompatible as doesn't have the exact same runtime behavior (eg. shifters on the P4). The only relevant metric: does it run the applications that customers use. The Crusoe/Efficeon issues were performance related.
- dvdkhlng 6y ago
  Just as a single data-point: I still had an old Crusoe-based TC-1000 [1] convertible lying around, that must be > 15 years old by now. About two years back I gave it a new hard-disk (some PATA to flash adapter), replaced the battery, upgraded to 768 MB RAM and installed a Devuan i386 OS on it (a Debian derivative). Even was able to make the pen work again (that needed some X-server source code hacks). The computer is somewhat sluggish with huge software (like Firefox) and especially software that does JIT-compilation, maybe due to limited size of the "code-morphing" cache. For simple java programs the only way to make them start up timely was to fully disable the JIT-compiler. But other than that it's a usable x86 machine (and all other laptops I know that are of similar age eventually failed to boot much earlier). [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compaq_TC1000 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compaq_TC1000
wvenable 6y ago
I had a Transmeta Crusoe powered Windows XP laptop and I never had compatibility issues. Performance issues... that's a different story.

saagarjha 6y ago

Reimplementing an ISA is not actually an impossible feat; many companies have done so successfully before.

VectorLock 6y ago
Nothing is impossible, but has anybody done it since 2000 starting from scratch? AMD obviously has been at it from the start, Cyrix, VIA, NEC all did it but any since Intel CPUs started being in the tens of millions of transistors?
- weare138 6y ago
  Hitachi SH-4 | 10M transistors | 1997 SPARC64 V | 191M transistors | 2001 DEC Alpha 21364 (EV7) | 152M transistors | 2003 SPARC64 V+ | 400M transistors | 2004 Cell | 250M transistors | 2005 POWER6 | 789M transistors | 2007 SPARC64 VI | 540M transistors | 2007 SPARC64 VIIIfx | 760M transistors | 2009 16-core SPARC T3 | 1B transistors | 2010 8-core POWER7 | 1.2B transistors | 2010 Quad-core z196 | 1.4B transistors | 2010 SPARC64 IXfx | 1.87B transistors | 2011 SPARC64 X | 2.99B transistors | 2012 8-core POWER7+ | 2.1B transistors | 2012 Apple A7 | 1B transistors | 2013 12-core POWER8 | 4.2B transistors | 2013 Apple A8 | 2B transistors | 2014 Apple A8X | 3B transistors | 2014 32-core SPARC M7 | 10B transistors | 2015 [insert a crapton of ARM CPUs here] AWS Graviton2 | 30B transistors | 2019
  - VectorLock 6y ago
    No x86 ISAs in here. All licensed designs or first party manufacturer. I wasn't saying nobody could make anything as complex as current Intel CPUs. Cloning other ISAs either from clean room or from licensed designs like ARM seems to be much easier than matching Intel CPUs with a massive breadth of software and less hard specifics at the edges.

PopeDotNinja 6y ago

I used to be skeptical of AMD CPUs & the various motherboards for a long time, too. I figured that Intel had the resources to test the crap out of my computer, and I really needed it to work.

VectorLock 6y ago
AMD started out and get the designs directly from Intel to make 8086 CPUs on license and continued onto the 286 until Intel broke their agreement and they had to make clean room 386 implementations. So AMD has been doing this since, essentially, the beginning, and have been able to iterate tracking Intel and not starting from scratch in the 2000s with an entirely new approach. They probably could have done it, eventually, but they ran out of funding and thats the end of the road for that adventure.

FullyFunctional 6y ago

This statement is pure FUD. There were no meaningful quality issues and the situation is exactly the same for all alternative implementations of the same ISA. You could make the same argument to say that AMD or even a new Intel microarchitecture is incompatible as doesn't have the exact same runtime behavior (eg. shifters on the P4). The only relevant metric: does it run the applications that customers use. The Crusoe/Efficeon issues were performance related.

dvdkhlng 6y ago
Just as a single data-point: I still had an old Crusoe-based TC-1000 [1] convertible lying around, that must be > 15 years old by now. About two years back I gave it a new hard-disk (some PATA to flash adapter), replaced the battery, upgraded to 768 MB RAM and installed a Devuan i386 OS on it (a Debian derivative). Even was able to make the pen work again (that needed some X-server source code hacks). The computer is somewhat sluggish with huge software (like Firefox) and especially software that does JIT-compilation, maybe due to limited size of the "code-morphing" cache. For simple java programs the only way to make them start up timely was to fully disable the JIT-compiler. But other than that it's a usable x86 machine (and all other laptops I know that are of similar age eventually failed to boot much earlier). [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compaq_TC1000 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compaq_TC1000

wvenable 6y ago

I had a Transmeta Crusoe powered Windows XP laptop and I never had compatibility issues. Performance issues... that's a different story.