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> But for a compiler to target... To what degree did Intel assume their target market was either using hand-coded assembly, or written-for-x87 code with x87-sp
by bell-cot 23d ago
> But for a compiler to target...
To what degree did Intel assume their target market was either using hand-coded assembly, or written-for-x87 code with x87-specific compilers? Memory was not cheap in 1980, ditto 8087 chips, and oddities like the x86's 64K segments would discourage anyone trying to "just recompile" existing programs for x86/x87.
- librasteve 23d agoat Weitek, we built the 1167 at about the same time as the 80287, we lined up compiler guys such as Green Hills to support our alternative coprocessor ASM (the instruction bus was memory mapped in the 80286 address space IIRC) … several folks would hand code inner loops eg for LINPACK, but already by this time the compiler tech was important to fully use the pipeline … loop unrolling, dead code elimination and so on.
- bell-cot 22d agoLooking at Wikipedia - might you mean the 1067? They appears to claim that the 1167 paired with the 80386...though that page certainly could be better-written and better-sourced.
- librasteve 22d agoah yes, I stand corrected the 1064 was the vanilla IEEE P754 64-bit pipeline and the 1067 added Intel bus interface