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The amount of accumulated cruft in the x86 architecture is astounding. Being a geezer, I remember when there was, for a brief moment, a genuine question whethe
by bradley13 8mo ago
The amount of accumulated cruft in the x86 architecture is astounding.
Being a geezer, I remember when there was, for a brief moment, a genuine question whether National Semiconductor, Motorola, or Intel would win the PC market. The NS processors had a nice, clean architecture. The Motorola processors, meh, ok. Intel already had cruft from earlier efforts like the 4004, and was just ugly.
Of course, Intel won, Motorola came in second, and NS became a footnote.
The x86 architecture has only gotten uglier over time.
- userbinator 8mo agoYou have to evolve to compete. Look what happened to MIPS, the classic "pure RISC". (I know about RISC-V, but at this point it's become just another cheap core for those who don't want to pay for ARM licenses.)
- snvzz 8mo agoRISC-V is not a core, it is an ISA. Beware chips with high performance microarchitectures compliant with RVA23 are coming later this year.
- userbinator 8mo agoSame difference. You can't get high performance without more complex instructions like ARM or x86.
- snvzz 8mo agoWe'll have to agree to disagree. Fortunately, this will be determined in practice in just months, not years from now.