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> and it sort of raises the question of which is the "abomination[s] forced on us as an accident of history." What I meant by that is the legacy of AMD64 havin
by jhgb 4y ago
> and it sort of raises the question of which is the "abomination[s] forced on us as an accident of history."
What I meant by that is the legacy of AMD64 having thousands of instructions, many of them with arbitrary opcode encoding, half-assed SIMD ISA instead of a proper vector ISA, and the ability to emulate an 8086, all purely for reasons of backwards compatibility. If you started designing a computing ecosystem completely from scratch, surely you wouldn't end up with an AMD64-based IBM PC descendant as your best idea you could come up with?
- saagarjha 4y agoThis would be kind of a sad direction to go in if we didn’t have any constraints, since we already have new architectures going in this direction anyways. When you take the crust of the ISA off though all processors look similar and that’s where the interesting bits lie.