What Makes a PDP-11/35 or 40 Tick?

On Wed, 12 Jun 2019 at 01:42, Fred Cisin via cctalk <cctalk at classiccmp.org> wrote: https://xkcd.com/979/ There are a couple of things now where I know that if I try to find sources, I'll find myself. The details of how id Software's game /Quake/ killed Cyrix, the CPU company, because Quake used a very clever method of interleaving FP ops with integer ops that didn't use the same registers, allowing the Pentium core to essentially run them at once. The Cyrix 6x86 core was quicker -- I bought one myself, what more can I say -- but it couldn't interleave FP and int ops like that, so it ran Quake like a dog. And as Quake was *the* most demanding game around in 1996 or so, and had a super convenient built-in "timedemo" feature, all the magazine's benchmarks used Quake. So 6x86s got hammered, even though on literally *ALL* OTHER X86-32 CODE THEY WERE QUICKER, they got bad reviews, and Cyrix ended up getting acquired by Via. Or the problems with AMD fglrx on a Toshiba Satellite Pro P300A. That'll be me, too. The weirdest one, though, was when I was given the honour (?) of moderating my first item at the World SF Convention. It was a collection of silly games. I'd never heard of one of them. I Googled it. I got my own blog as the ? 2 or ? 3 hit. _That_ was odd. -- Liam Proven - Profile: https://about.me/liamproven Email: lproven at cix.co.uk - Google Mail/Hangouts/Plus: lproven at gmail.com Twitter/Facebook/Flickr: lproven - Skype/LinkedIn: liamproven UK: +44 7939-087884 - ?R (+ WhatsApp/Telegram/Signal): +420 702 829 053