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I think there was another big sea-change caused by AMD. Before this, architecture and ISA were absolutely key - RISC was the way of the future. RISC architectu

I think there was another big sea-change caused by AMD. Before this, architecture and ISA were absolutely key - RISC was the way of the future. RISC architectures were theoretically running loops around CISC ones. AMD bolted a CISC onto a RISC core and effectively made this architecture point moot. This approach let AMD and Intel use their momentum and market to catch up and overtake their workstation friends.

Tamerlin 18y ago
The big sea change that AMD caused is that 64-bit processors are now a commodity. Intel COULD have done that without AMD, but I doubt that they WOULD have if AMD hadn't essentially forced their hand.
- rbanffy 18y ago
  And it's so ironic that people who were not married to x86 architectures enjoyed 64-bit computing a full decade before it became mainstream (as in "you could order a box from Dell")... And that Sun had one of the first full implementations (I think MIPS got there first).
tptacek 18y ago
I thought Intel invented the micro-op architecture with the Pentium Pro.
- jwilliams 18y ago
  Yeah - although microcode had been around for a very long time. The difference between microcode and RISC was the amount of synchronisation - RISC generally implied lots of uniform, high performance operations. Microcode could, but didn't necessarily. e.g. Microcode could still be doing funky co-ordination with lots of specialised execution units (and did afaik). This has some similarities to RISC, but RISC is a different philosophy really - namely fewer types, pipelined accesses, uniform instructions, more registers, etc. (In my view) the big watershed moment was AMD's K5 architecture. This was literally based on one of AMD's pure RISC designs. It wasn't that popular in itself, but it set up a golden age for AMD... Which really only came to an end with Intel's Core.
  - tptacek 18y ago
    Microcode is an implementation technique. Micro-ops (or whatever Intel formally calls them) is an instruction dispatch architecture --- an actual microarchitectural feature. Just to be pedantic.
- lallysingh 18y ago
  I thought that was all originally DEC Alpha IP.

Tamerlin 18y ago

The big sea change that AMD caused is that 64-bit processors are now a commodity. Intel COULD have done that without AMD, but I doubt that they WOULD have if AMD hadn't essentially forced their hand.

rbanffy 18y ago
And it's so ironic that people who were not married to x86 architectures enjoyed 64-bit computing a full decade before it became mainstream (as in "you could order a box from Dell")... And that Sun had one of the first full implementations (I think MIPS got there first).

tptacek 18y ago

I thought Intel invented the micro-op architecture with the Pentium Pro.

jwilliams 18y ago
Yeah - although microcode had been around for a very long time. The difference between microcode and RISC was the amount of synchronisation - RISC generally implied lots of uniform, high performance operations. Microcode could, but didn't necessarily. e.g. Microcode could still be doing funky co-ordination with lots of specialised execution units (and did afaik). This has some similarities to RISC, but RISC is a different philosophy really - namely fewer types, pipelined accesses, uniform instructions, more registers, etc. (In my view) the big watershed moment was AMD's K5 architecture. This was literally based on one of AMD's pure RISC designs. It wasn't that popular in itself, but it set up a golden age for AMD... Which really only came to an end with Intel's Core.
- tptacek 18y ago
  Microcode is an implementation technique. Micro-ops (or whatever Intel formally calls them) is an instruction dispatch architecture --- an actual microarchitectural feature. Just to be pedantic.
lallysingh 18y ago
I thought that was all originally DEC Alpha IP.