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x86 is a hack on top of a chip design that was originally intended as a low-cost calculator CPU that gradually grew up to power big-iron servers. Most of its co
by tabtab 4y ago
x86 is a hack on top of a chip design that was originally intended as a low-cost calculator CPU that gradually grew up to power big-iron servers. Most of its competitors were designed for medium or large computers from the get-go, so had far less backward-compatibility baggage to deal with.
- thedeadfish 4y agoNot at all, the original 16bit x86 was well designed. The 32bit extensions were pretty decent too. Its not until much later that it really started to turn to shit. The real disaster started when Intel started haphazardly adding terribly thought out SIMD instructions. AMD64 truly sucks though, this is where the original encoding should have been replaced.
- tabtab 4y agoThe 16bit chip had to be backward compatible with the 8bit, no?
- thedeadfish 4y agoKind of but not really, whilst it shares some design choices, the 8086 is neither source or binary compatible with the 8080.