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Intel 80386, a Revolutionary CPU

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Re: Intel 80386, a Revolutionary CPU

#131

Post by tyingq »

cturner wrote: post #125

Intel evolved the x86 line beyond 386, into Pentium Pro and then to amd64. Why did Motorolla not do the same with the 68k? I have seen discussion that treats it as assumed knowledge that 68k was obsolete and needed to be replaced by powerpc. But it seems like conjecture - I have not seem technical arguments, and 68k seems like a cleaner architecture to ride forward than post-286 x86.

>Were there any commercial efforts to build IDE, VESA or PCI systems around a 68k processor?

Sort of. There was the VME bus. An attempt to have a standards based bus that would work across vendors, and also for the the 88k cpu. It wasn't wildly successful, but was mildly successful.

Re: Intel 80386, a Revolutionary CPU

#132

Post by monocasa »

jacquesm wrote: post #110
xxs wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>I'm not sure what you base your 'weakest' Linux kernel has memory barriers, Alpha makes an exception with needing virtually all of them - with other architectures (esp. the total store order ones) some (most) of the barriers are nop. Yet, overall Alpha is famous for how crazy the memory model is. There is nothing like any longer (personally I am happy with Java Memory Model). Just to make sure it's understood "weak"…

That's what allows the Alpha to be multi-processor. And if you like the 'Java Memory Model' I'm not sure what your point really is, you're comparing a virtual machine with actual hardware.

Java was one of the first machines (virtual or physical) to take a stab at defining its memory model in modern way.

It's also pretty sane while also scaling to large systems as Azul's 768 core boxes showed.

Re: Intel 80386, a Revolutionary CPU

#133

Post by awiesenhofer »

mschuster91 wrote: post #21
kristopolous wrote: post #4

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…

> and getting slaughtered in their only remaining stronghold by NVIDIA, AMD and ARM pillaging their castle NVIDIA doesn't make good CPUs, even their SoCs are ... not exactly state of the art. No mass market adoption besides automotive who don't care about anything but long availability of (spare) parts and the Nintendo Switch which likely only still uses the same 2015-era Tegra chipset because even someone as big as…

> no viable ARM desktop or laptop CPUs because Qualcomm completely fucked up that market for likely years to come

not a huge fan of Qualcomm but you might be interested in this:

"Qualcomm Snapdragon X Elite Performance Preview: A First Look at What’s to Come" https://www.anandtech.com/show/21112/qualcomm-snapdragon-x-e...

Re: Intel 80386, a Revolutionary CPU

#134

Post by Someone »

mschuster91 wrote: post #27
kristopolous wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> The only player in town able to make ARM work on anything but smartphones and servers is Apple, and they don't (and never will, assuming regulators don't finally wake up and force them) sell to third parties.

I think that would be new territory for regulators. Have there ever been examples where they forced a vertical integrator to sell individual parts to other parties (either at mass to other manufacturers or to consumers?)

Re: Intel 80386, a Revolutionary CPU

#136

Post by gpderetta »

adrian_b wrote: post #109
zozbot234 wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> There were no atomic instructions (/LOCK wasn't useful for this), which is why many modern OSes support the 80486 but not the 80386. Does the lack of atomics really matter, given that there was (AIUI) no SMP on the 386? You can always disable interrupts to make your operation 'atomic' in a uniprocessor context.

Already starting with 8086 all Intel x86 CPUs have been intended to be usable in SMP systems. Nevertheless, there have been very few SMP systems using early Intel CPUs, before 80486, mainly because those CPUs were still too weak in comparison with the contemporaneous mini-computers, and not even SMP would have made them competitive in performance, while the high price of SMP would have been incompatible with personal…

I don't think exchange is enough to implement all (or even most) lock-free/wait-free algorithms. CAS (i.e. lock cmpxchg), or an equivalent primitive in power, is needed.

XCHG is enough to implement a mutex though, which is what most applications need.

Re: Intel 80386, a Revolutionary CPU

#137

Post by mschuster91 »

awiesenhofer wrote: post #133
mschuster91 wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> and getting slaughtered in their only remaining stronghold by NVIDIA, AMD and ARM pillaging their castle NVIDIA doesn't make good CPUs, even their SoCs are ... not exactly state of the art. No mass market adoption besides automotive who don't care about anything but long availability of (spare) parts and the Nintendo Switch which likely only still uses the same 2015-era Tegra chipset because even someone as big as…

> no viable ARM desktop or laptop CPUs because Qualcomm completely fucked up that market for likely years to come not a huge fan of Qualcomm but you might be interested in this: "Qualcomm Snapdragon X Elite Performance Preview: A First Look at What’s to Come" https://www.anandtech.com/show/21112/qualcomm-snapdragon-x-e...

I'll believe it when I see it having been taken apart by actually independent nerds who look beyond benchmarks and actually take care if the fundamentals work properly.

The state of Qualcomm products over the last years has left me with absolutely zero confidence.

Re: Intel 80386, a Revolutionary CPU

#138

Post by mschuster91 »

flykespice wrote: post #42
mschuster91 wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> and getting slaughtered in their only remaining stronghold by NVIDIA, AMD and ARM pillaging their castle NVIDIA doesn't make good CPUs, even their SoCs are ... not exactly state of the art. No mass market adoption besides automotive who don't care about anything but long availability of (spare) parts and the Nintendo Switch which likely only still uses the same 2015-era Tegra chipset because even someone as big as…

> there are outside of the Mac world no viable ARM desktop or laptop CPUs because Qualcomm completely fucked up that market for likely years to come Huh citation needed? I would like to know more context on that

Qualcomm had an exclusivity deal with Microsoft for years [1], which they then used to deliver absolute crap to customers, which in combination with almost zero software being available on Windows for ARM [2] (even popular software such as Chrome...) led to these things being nice paperweights.

[1] https://www.xda-developers.com/qualcomm-exclusivity-deal-mic...

[2] https://www.digitaltrends.com/computing/why-windows-on-arm-c...

Re: Intel 80386, a Revolutionary CPU

#139

Post by xtracto »

ndsipa_pomu wrote: post #128
cturner wrote: post #125

Intel evolved the x86 line beyond 386, into Pentium Pro and then to amd64. Why did Motorolla not do the same with the 68k? I have seen discussion that treats it as assumed knowledge that 68k was obsolete and needed to be replaced by powerpc. But it seems like conjecture - I have not seem technical arguments, and 68k seems like a cleaner architecture to ride forward than post-286 x86.

Not enough computers were sold using 68k to provide enough demand for the chips and so it couldn't compete with Intel on price and couldn't justify spending lots on research and development. Intel had the PC-compatible market and thus a huge demand for its chips.

Here's my 3rd world country perspective, from someone growing in the 80s:

We never had intel chips. They were expensive. I had a Texas Instruments 286 and a cyrix 486 years later. The computer in my Dad's office were all "pc compatible" . This was a university (biology department in a God forsaken poor small city in Mexico). Someone got it bought because it was going to "change the world" (oh boy). We played TDCGA.EXE and PRINCE.EXE from its 2 51/4 floppy drives. No HDD.

We heard about apple's, commodore's and other crazy computers, but they were for "gringos" or rich people.

At the same time, we shared (pirated) software as if there was no tomorrow. Spread like wildfire. As and played the heck out of ID shareware.

Then you had the Mexican middle upper class: whose dad bought Macintosh one of those others. They NOW had to spend all this money to get it to do something (buy software). Nobody was pirating/sharing programs, and the PC ones just didn't work.

So a virtuous cycle continued and we kept buying x86.

Great memories! I'm glad I was part of that dawn of PC.

Re: Intel 80386, a Revolutionary CPU

#140

Post by Laforet »

ngcc_hk wrote: post #72
scrlk wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Andy Grove moving Intel from memory to microprocessors was an excellent strategic move. > "Business success contains the seeds of its own destruction. Success breeds complacency. Complacency breeds failure. Only the paranoid survive." Something that Intel's leaders didn't pay attention to during the 2010s.

There is even a story plus a term for it. The story is about what if we all go out off this room and come back like a new guy. What would we do? "strategic inflection point" ... They decide to move from a memory company to a CPU company. No access to Nikon but being just a Leica len maker for Canon (and famously found by DDD and used in Korea War), then move to nikon rangefinder (but strangely follow Zeiss approach m…

Nikon started off as a defense contractor making rifle scopes and artillery sights for the military. Camera lens was a side business that took over after the war.

While no longer on the cutting edge, they still have a significant presence in the semiconductor lithography business. So they will survive in one way or another even if they stop making cameras one day.

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