31–40 of 180 posts
The 80386 DX was a revolutionary CPU. It certainly foreshadowed the 486 and ultimately the Pentium. Most people I know only had a 80386 SX which was still revolutionary but it hid it well by being essentially a glorified (but slower) 80286 on the outside.
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Coming out with better chips at lower prices. I know how obvious that sounds but it's true. The difficulty is they need to make nearly decade-long bets that are the size of small countries economies due to the complexity of manufacturing and Intel's made a few bad ones recently. I don't know who to listen to on what chip design will be a market win in 2030 either. AI applications are extremely resource intensive so t…
wouldn’t graphics and AI both pretty much reduce to mad matrix operations?
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Yes. For one no one has mentioned that the 386 itself had no on die hardware floating point. That seems like a huge one. Even if only a few instructions were added to the “core” some are huge like CMPXCHG, CMOV and although not an instruction itself the LOCK prefix. But the extensions are huge. We don’t even still use the floating point instructions of the 386/387 era. MMX was pretty lame but SSE and AVX are critical…
> although not an instruction itself the LOCK prefix. From what I can tell, the 386 had the LOCK prefix. Pin 26 (bottom left) is LOCK# driven by the LOCK prefix [1]. But CMPXCHG is very useful and wasn't available until 486, and Pentium added some other stuff that's important. [1] https://www.eeeguide.com/intel-80386-pin-diagram-description...
They were in big trouble then. The entire company was riding on it being great. It could have easily gone awry as it did for Data General, Honeywell, CDC, AST, Tandy, Olivetti, Xerox, DEC Rainbow, AT&T Hobbit, Wang 2200 and Unisys. Strong survivorship bias on this one. Most of the once Titans are in or near the dustbin now, such as SDS, SDC and Fairchild. Intel's history was primarily as a memory manufacturer. They'r…
DEC should have packaged the LSI-11 into a consumer machine. They had all the software, which was top shelf.
I had an H-11, it was a great machine.
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Coming out with better chips at lower prices. I know how obvious that sounds but it's true. The difficulty is they need to make nearly decade-long bets that are the size of small countries economies due to the complexity of manufacturing and Intel's made a few bad ones recently. I don't know who to listen to on what chip design will be a market win in 2030 either. AI applications are extremely resource intensive so t…
wouldn’t graphics and AI both pretty much reduce to mad matrix operations?
They have an NVIDIA mainline competitor in their A770 but I think they should be exiting the direct nvidia assault strategy. I really don't know how that's going to work. They're basically a nonplayer https://www.videocardbenchmark.net/high_end_gpus.html
What's their winning move in that approach? It's just money in a volcano.
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Arm snatched Intel's hold on the Apple market and we can invoke any Clayton Christensen book on the Raspberry PI series. Maybe not the Raspberry PI 5, but what about say, the imaginary 8 or the 9 a few years hence? The Pi 400 isn't their final attempt into the PC market, only their first. Surely a slew of decent ARM based laptops from one of these SBC manufacturers is coming along eventually - and I don't mean chrome…
Yeah but that was only made possible by Apple's unique circumstances: their close control over the entire tech stack, their experience with architecture transitions (PPC->x86-32->x86-64->ARM) and the required tooling (Rosetta, fat binaries, compilers), their relatively small market size, their expertise in developing with/for ARM from iOS, and enough cash in hand to buy out the entire fab capacity of TSMC. In the Win…
Windows NT shipped on about 7 or so architectures including PowerPC for the Xbox360. And they also have experience with emulation, that's how they got Xbox 360 emulation on the newer X86 models. Just read their papers on arch emulation.
What they don't have and Apple has is 10+ experience in shipping tailor made ARM chips fit to their needs, because they always left chip design to their partners, as they were always a SW company first not a HW product company like Apple, and this isn't something they can start and catch up with in the snap of a finger.
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Yeah but that was only made possible by Apple's unique circumstances: their close control over the entire tech stack, their experience with architecture transitions (PPC->x86-32->x86-64->ARM) and the required tooling (Rosetta, fat binaries, compilers), their relatively small market size, their expertise in developing with/for ARM from iOS, and enough cash in hand to buy out the entire fab capacity of TSMC. In the Win…
You're wrong about Microsoft here. They too have loads of experience developing their SW for multiple architectures, even moreso than Apple. Windows NT shipped on about 7 or so architectures including PowerPC for the Xbox360. And they also have experience with emulation, that's how they got Xbox 360 emulation on the newer X86 models. Just read their papers on arch emulation. What they don't have and Apple has is 10+…
The entire NT stuff has gone down the drain. The last non-x86 platforms were dropped around 2000 [1] until ARM entered the picture in 2012, but the latter was mostly used for Windows Phone for many years which itself got discontinued around 2017.
All these many thousand human-years of experience have long ago retired or went to other companies, their institutional knowledge is effectively lost for Microsoft. And that is the problem.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_NT#Supported_platforms
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Arm snatched Intel's hold on the Apple market and we can invoke any Clayton Christensen book on the Raspberry PI series. Maybe not the Raspberry PI 5, but what about say, the imaginary 8 or the 9 a few years hence? The Pi 400 isn't their final attempt into the PC market, only their first. Surely a slew of decent ARM based laptops from one of these SBC manufacturers is coming along eventually - and I don't mean chrome…
Yeah but that was only made possible by Apple's unique circumstances: their close control over the entire tech stack, their experience with architecture transitions (PPC->x86-32->x86-64->ARM) and the required tooling (Rosetta, fat binaries, compilers), their relatively small market size, their expertise in developing with/for ARM from iOS, and enough cash in hand to buy out the entire fab capacity of TSMC. In the Win…
Heh, https://cdixon.org/2010/01/03/the-next-big-thing-will-start-...
«The reason big new things sneak by incumbents is that the next big thing always starts out being dismissed as a “toy.” This is one of the main insights of Clay Christensen’s “disruptive technology” theory.»
Tho Raspberry Pi computers are designed to a low price point, so they are aiming for the low end not the high end. But the 5 is about as powerful as the last-generation Intel MacBooks, despite using fairly old Arm cores. I don’t think they can be casually dismissed.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yeah but that was only made possible by Apple's unique circumstances: their close control over the entire tech stack, their experience with architecture transitions (PPC->x86-32->x86-64->ARM) and the required tooling (Rosetta, fat binaries, compilers), their relatively small market size, their expertise in developing with/for ARM from iOS, and enough cash in hand to buy out the entire fab capacity of TSMC. In the Win…
You're wrong about Microsoft here. They too have loads of experience developing their SW for multiple architectures, even moreso than Apple. Windows NT shipped on about 7 or so architectures including PowerPC for the Xbox360. And they also have experience with emulation, that's how they got Xbox 360 emulation on the newer X86 models. Just read their papers on arch emulation. What they don't have and Apple has is 10+…
Apple has more leverage over devs; they can say "No more x86-64 in N years" and the developers basically have to move to ARM or abandon MacOS. This bootstraps the market; people who want MacOS have to suck it in and buy ARM because it's the only new hardware we'll be seeing in the future.
Microsoft doesn't control the hardware sector to put a hard deadline on new x86-64 products, and it would be suicidal to cut off the x86-64 software support at any time in the near future.
This means we'll see new x86-64 Windows machines in the store, and all the third-party apps supporting x86-64 Windows, for years to come. So as a consumer, why would I want an ARM-Windows machine? It has little exclusive software, is likely buggier and less mature, and probably runs the vast majority of x86-64 software in an emulation penalty box.