3 ms·
Yes. For one no one has mentioned that the 386 itself had no on die hardware floating point. That seems like a huge one. Even if only a few instructions were
by epcoa 3y ago
Yes.
For one no one has mentioned that the 386 itself had no on die hardware floating point. That seems like a huge one.
Even if only a few instructions were added to the “core” some are huge like CMPXCHG, CMOV and although not an instruction itself the LOCK prefix.
But the extensions are huge. We don’t even still use the floating point instructions of the 386/387 era. MMX was pretty lame but SSE and AVX are critical. AES-NI is now necessary for most people with FDE commonplace.
- toast0 3y ago> although not an instruction itself the LOCK prefix. From what I can tell, the 386 had the LOCK prefix. Pin 26 (bottom left) is LOCK# driven by the LOCK prefix [1]. But CMPXCHG is very useful and wasn't available until 486, and Pentium added some other stuff that's important. [1] https://www.eeeguide.com/intel-80386-pin-diagram-description/ https://www.eeeguide.com/intel-80386-pin-diagram-description...
- epcoa 3y agoMy mistake.
- userbinator 3y agoThe 8086 had the LOCK prefix. Intel was thinking of multiprocessing from the beginning.