The Boston Diaries

The ongoing saga of a programmer who doesn't live in Boston, nor does he even like Boston, but yet named his weblog/journal “The Boston Diaries.”

Go figure.

Sunday, November 24, 2019

The major reason why Intel needs to twist the tail of a Pentium so it will go 50 MIPS is because 45 of them are LOAD and STORE.

Via Lobsters comes this brief historty of the x86 architecture and the 1,000 ways to move data between registers, and by 1,000 ways, it really is 1,000 ways. Mind boggling. These days, the x86 has exceeded any known definition of CISC and is now into LICISC territory.

It's also interesting to see just how far back the x86 line goes—it pretty much starts with the Intel 4-bit 4004 back in 1971. So it seems we're running a 64-bit extension over a 32-bit extention over a 16-bit redesign of an 8-bit computer based on a 4-bit computer from a 2-bit company with just one CPU line. Nice.

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