51–60 of 62 posts
I remember reading a computer architecture book that used a fictional MIPS instruction set and used washing and drying clothes as an example of how to pipeline / do parallel instructions. Does anyone remember the name of that book?
That description probably applies to several computer architecture books, but the one I read was like that and called "Computer Organization and Design: The Hardware/Software Interface".
I'm honestly confused - why is a wikipedia page about an old computer architecture on the front page of HN?
I'm honestly confused - why is a wikipedia page about an old computer architecture on the front page of HN?
Hundreds of thousands -- maybe millions? -- of MIPS-derived chips are still made every day.
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Alpha is bae. PowerPC is great as long as you don't look at the fever dream nightmare that is it's supervisor state.
Alpha had a weakly-ordered memory model though.
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Even more fun alternative history: What if Motorola didn't end 68000 with the 68060? 68060 released earlier than the pentium, and regardless it had about twice the performance per clock. But then Motorola decided to abandon 68k to focus on PowerPC. Going further back: What if IBM picked 68000 over the 8086 for the PC? I'm hoping RISC-V will put an end to x86. It's about time.
> I'm hoping RISC-V will put an end to x86. It's about time. Not only is this wishful thinking and ignores the success so far of ARM, it doesn't make much sense any more - x86 is already "dead", almost all modern PCs will run amd64, with x86 as a kind of short-instruction emulation mode.
If RISC-V gets its Bitmanip extension, it might even deserve to displace ARM and x86.
But I might be biased.
Still, the barrel shifter on the ARM register bank output was inspired. For its time.
Alternative history time: what if MIPS R4000 hasn't been killed by Pentium? Would we be running R10000-compatibles now?
We would be all now asking ourselves: What if Pentium hasn’t been killed by MIPS R4000?
No one would wonder at x86 passing, it would have seemed totally obvious and overdue. Pentium surviving was astonishing. Still is. Probably another crime to lay at Microsoft's door.
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We would be all now asking ourselves: What if Pentium hasn’t been killed by MIPS R4000?
Nah, we would be wondering about one of the others. What if Power hadn't? What if Alpha hadn't? No one would wonder at x86 passing, it would have seemed totally obvious and overdue. Pentium surviving was astonishing. Still is. Probably another crime to lay at Microsoft's door.
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Why does everyone seem to hate delay slots? I understand that it makes writing assembly more annoying but most people use a compiler anyway.
It makes the hardware implementation more complicated. The delay slot was perfect for the 5-pipeline original design. Once you try to push this to out of order execution (executing more than one instruction per cycle), the delay slot just doesn't make any sense.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Even more fun alternative history: What if Motorola didn't end 68000 with the 68060? 68060 released earlier than the pentium, and regardless it had about twice the performance per clock. But then Motorola decided to abandon 68k to focus on PowerPC. Going further back: What if IBM picked 68000 over the 8086 for the PC? I'm hoping RISC-V will put an end to x86. It's about time.
I remember there was a 68000-series with a 56000 on chip. I would love to have seen a 68000 make it into the 64-bit era with a built in DSP. I did love programming those things. I would imagine some ColdFire-style pruning of the instruction set would have happened for the 64-bit era.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I remember there was a 68000-series with a 56000 on chip. I would love to have seen a 68000 make it into the 64-bit era with a built in DSP. I did love programming those things. I would imagine some ColdFire-style pruning of the instruction set would have happened for the 64-bit era.
Are you sure you're not thinking of the Atari Falcon? It was a 68030-based machine that had a 56k as well. It's not on the same chip though.