8 Oct
2002
8 Oct
'02
8:15 p.m.
Jerome H. Fine wrote:
Harsh! :)
Guess it depends on what you mean by "far behind from a
technical point of view."
If you mean that x86 is an ugly legacy architecture, with
not nearly enough registers, an instruction set which
doesn't fit any reasonable pipeline, that's ugly to decode
and not particularly orthogonal, that from purely technical
reasons ought to have died a timely death in 1990,
I'd have to agree.
However, look at the performance. P4 is up near the
top of the tree with the best RISC CPUs, which have
the advantage of clean design and careful evolution.
It surely takes a great deal of inspiration, creativity,
and engineering talent to take something as ill-suited
as the x86 architecture and get this kind of performance
out of it. IMHO.
In other words, making x86 fast must be a lot like
getting Dumbo off the air. That ought to count as
some kind of technical achievement. :)
Imagine if the same amount of effort was applied
to a sensible machine, like MIPS, Alpha, or ARM!
Or even a 64 bit-wide Z80 :)
-- Ross
Jim Kearney
wrote:
I just had an email exchange with someone at
Intel's Museum
(http://www.intel.com/intel/intelis/museum/index.htm)
Jerome Fine replies:
I am not sure why the information is so blatant in its
stupid attempt to ignore anything but Intel hardware
as far a anything that even look like a CPU chip, but
I guess it is an "Intel" museum.
Of course, even now, Intel, in my opinion, is so far
behind from a technical point of view that is is a sad
comment just to read about the products that were
way behind, and still are, the excellence of other
products. No question that if the Pentium 4 had been
produced 10 years ago, it would have been a major
accomplishment.
Sincerely yours,
Jerome Fine
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