19 ms·
> It came a few years later but the ARM1 which used 25,000 transistors and was built on roughly the same process size [1] and was much faster than the 8086/8088
by justin66 6y ago
> It came a few years later but the ARM1 which used 25,000 transistors and was built on roughly the same process size [1] and was much faster than the 8086/8088 shows what might have been had Intel gone down a RISC route.
The 8086 the 8088 was based on was released in 1978. The ARM1 was released in 1985. That was an eternity.
- klelatti 6y agoIt was a long time but the ARM1 didn't benefit because of the development of Moore's law over that period - if you look at the process, die size and clock speed it's all comparable with the 8086 - the ARM1 was built with very mature (and cheap) technology. As has been said elsewhere the ARM1 wouldn't have worked commercially in 1978 because of code density and bus width.
- justin66 6y agoWell, okay, but it seems more significant to me that the ARM1 did not exist in the late seventies - which would have been really great - because the field advanced. The original comment struck me as a bit strange because it implies that Intel just made a single bad call, or something.
- klelatti 6y agoVery much agree - I was (not very effectively) trying to make the point that its not just about transistor counts and that what you do with those transistors - the field advancing as you say - matters a lot too. Credit to Hennessey etc who developed the original RISC concept. I do think though that if you look back at the history Intel put huge resources into the iAPX432 which was hugely overambitious and they had to rely on the fallback of the 8086/88. There is probably a reasonable case that if they had hadn't split their resources we might have had something better than the 8086.