After years of delivering faster and faster chips that can easily boost the performance of most desktop software, Intel says the free ride is over. Already, chipmakers like Intel and AMD are delivering processors that have multiple brains, or cores, rather than single brains that run ever faster. The challenge is that most of today's software isn't built to handle that kind of advance. "The software has to also start following Moore's law," Intel fellow Shekhar Borkar said, referring to the notion that chips offer roughly double the performance every 18 months to two years. "Software has to double the amount of parallelism that it can support every two years."
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Member since:2006-10-08
"[...] I think it's been clearly demonstrated that the x86 we have today is not the same x86 that was in the 80s."
Not the same, sure, but it's a successor of the original architecture whose inner parts you can still find. Otherwise, backwards compatibility would not exist the way it does.
Erm, what about the A20, does it still exist? C:/WINA20.386, anyone? :-)
Member since:2005-07-06
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A20_line
http://www.win.tue.nl/~aeb/linux/kbd/A20.html
this?
hell, reading that last one, one really starts to wonder what kind of house of cards modern X86 based computers are, even before the os comes into play...
Edited 2007-05-27 16:01
Member since:2005-07-06
A lot of the really old things (like A20) are emulated in the chipset these days. On an EFI system (Apple's machines), the old BIOS-related cruft isn't even there anymore. AMD64 gets rid of a lot of the weirder aspects of x86 (segmentation, TSS, ASCII instructions). Call gates and that crap have been deprecated in favor of sysenter/sysexit. No modern OS uses them, though they exist in micro-coded form for compatibility purposes.
x87 is unfortunately still there (though basically deprecated in AMD64). Of the instructions that matter, MUL, DIV, and IDIV still have an implicit accumulator (though oddly enough, IMUL has a 2-operand form). Lot's of instructions still have accumulator forms, though you can mostly ignore them. These are really the bits of fundamental cruft that you can't just emulate or otherwise bury in microcode.
Edited 2007-05-27 18:45
Member since:
2006-05-14
I don't agree with your topic. The "80's" architecture has been rehashed a million times over and I think it's been clearly demonstrated that the x86 we have today is not the same x86 that was in the 80s.