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AMD’s Athlon 64: Getting the Basics Right
- rootw0rm 4y agoInteresting comparison, thanks for sharing. Fond memories of Windows XP x64 on AMD Athlon 64. To think that I actually ran into the problem of no 16-bit executable support, lol. I reverse-engineered my first 64 bit executable with this processor: Photoshop.
- temac 4y agoThe funny thing is that long mode can actually support win16 applications, and Wine does it.
- gary_0 4y agoI noticed that K8's the 3-wide pipeline has 3 AGUs alongside the ALUs, which led me to wonder how modern RISC architectures handle address calculations. Do they still have separate AGU circuitry? [edit] After some furious Googling it looks like AGUs are still a thing in RISC architectures such as: https://en.wikichip.org/wiki/arm_holdings/microarchitectures/cortex-a77 https://en.wikichip.org/wiki/arm_holdings/microarchitectures... and https://en.wikichip.org/wiki/sifive/microarchitectures/7_series https://en.wikichip.org/wiki/sifive/microarchitectures/7_ser...
- ahartmetz 4y agoThrowing ALUs and load/store units at the problem, specifically, seems like a great and obvious idea in retrospect. It seems to have become conventional wisdom. They don't take much area compared to all the scheduling and bookkeeping hardware that tries to keep them busy.
- flatiron 4y agoAnd now we are paying the price of throwing scheduling hardware at the problem…
- ahartmetz 4y agoI was thinking specifically of Apple's M1 and recent upgrades from AMD and Intel, which all "go wider" (more execution units) and it works well for them. In some cases, these units can't even possibly be fed in steady state, only e.g. while catching up from some misprediction or cache miss.
- unethical_ban 4y agoThis was the first processor family I used for my own builds when I got into the hobby in 2004. I came of age when AMD was on top. I've only had two Intel processors in my main machines over the past 18 years - a Pentium D 805 (cheap dual core vs. AMD's offerings) and a Haswell in 2014 (K10 was a disaster).