Earlier quoted context omitted.
The 386SX could do everything the 386DX did, just slower. My first Linux box was a 386SX machine. Before Linux, I ran Coherent on it: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coherent_(operating_system)
Another Coherent fan here. That was an awesome system. And for once: awesome documentation. The Coherent book long outlived the Coherent system for me.
Intel 80386, a Revolutionary CPU
151–160 of 180 posts
Re: Intel 80386, a Revolutionary CPU
#152Earlier quoted context omitted.
The 386SX could do everything the 386DX did, just slower. My first Linux box was a 386SX machine. Before Linux, I ran Coherent on it: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coherent_(operating_system)
Coherent sounds really cool, I've never heard of it before. I wish I had known about it back in the day. I had a 386DX, 25 MHz with 4MB and ran Slackware 3.0 with kernel 1.2.13 on it. It worked pretty nicely for me, but I have to say that I spent most of my time on the console. X11 did run but it was too slow to be fun.
Once Linux stabilized, the writing was on the wall...
Re: Intel 80386, a Revolutionary CPU
#153Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think DEC's strong trend line of NIH (almost as strong as IBM) almost certainly dooms a PC-PDP - IBM only made the PC by effectively creating a skunkworks within the company that was focused solely on 'go to market' compared to the normal IBM development process. I dont know if DEC could or would have done that.
I was a DEC-head in the 70's and 80's, and along with my fellow DEC-heads anxiously awaited DEC's entry into the PC arena. Everyone was excited to see the rollout of the Rainbow, sure it would be a killer machine like other DEC machines. After the presentation, we were all in shock. It did not play to any of DEC's strengths, and was just a crummy, proprietary x86 insult. That was the end of our love affair with DEC.…
DEC tried to go after IBM and in doing so structured itself after IBM, it lead to multiple competing projects and groups doing similar work, multiple layers of management making the company unwieldy to manage, and a sales force that had trouble building the customer relationship because of internal structures.
The same thing functionally killed Motorola, and will eventually harm Cisco too (Cisco is a company that in my opinion is ripe for 'disruption').
Re: Intel 80386, a Revolutionary CPU
#154Earlier quoted context omitted.
Thats an interesting alternative history thought experiment. I wonder how early one could capture the complexity of the full PDP-11 microarchitecture on a single chip? Would it have been affordable? What about the support hardware?
If Intel could do it, DEC could do it.
Intel did not do that, IBM in this case managed to - and it had the cachet and name recognition to sell an product that was largely middling in a technical level, over other options that were often superior technically and cheaper.
Intel made a decent enough microprocessor, yes it was kludgy (even the 8086 was), but it performed well enough (I've never seen a claim that the 68000 significantly outperformed the 8086), and was available in quantity. The rest of the things that made the IBM PC a system that stormed the world were COTS parts assembled in an attractive package.
Now, could DEC have done all of that with the PDP-11, yes, absolutely - but the winds were prevailing against it because of the nature of DEC management - I fundamentally do not believe that DEC would not have allowed itself to ship something as 'flawed' as the IBM PC was.
Re: Intel 80386, a Revolutionary CPU
#155Earlier quoted context omitted.
Another Coherent fan here. That was an awesome system. And for once: awesome documentation. The Coherent book long outlived the Coherent system for me.
I totally agree! I still remember the cover of that book, with the picture of the shell on it. I learned most of the "POSIX" APIs from it before I moved to Linux.
Re: Intel 80386, a Revolutionary CPU
#156How the hell does _that_ happen? I've never had a job in 30 years where I didn't have somebody breathing down my neck to produce something tangible every couple of _days_.
Re: Intel 80386, a Revolutionary CPU
#157Earlier quoted context omitted.
Lock-free and wait-free algorithms are not necessary for any computing task. They are only a performance enhancement and they indeed require either compare-and-swap (simple and double) from the IBM System/370 (1973) (later used by Motorola MC68020, then simple compare-and-swap was added to 486 and double compare-and-swap to Pentium) or load-locked + store-conditional from the S-1 Advanced Architecture Processor (LLNL…
Well you mention that you can implement all programs, I just wanted to clarify that there are indeed some algorithms that cannot be implemented. In any case this has nothing to do with performance, you might need lock-free algorithms for correctness when implementing some real-time systems or when you need code to be reentrant.
Access to any kind of shared resource is always correct when only a single thread can access it.
With mutual exclusion it is very easy to guarantee correctness due to serialized accesses. With lock-free algorithms concurrent accesses are possible and the algorithms must be carefully analyzed to demonstrate their correctness.
Moreover, exactly in real-time systems is where lock-free algorithms are undesirable. Any pure lock-free algorithm must detect a transaction failure and retry it. There is no guarantee of success and no limit for the number of retries, so any hard real-time deadlines can be missed. Lock-free algorithms can be used in real-time systems only if they detect too many retries and then they fall back to lock-based algorithms before it is too late.
The lock-free algorithms improve only the execution time of the typical case, but they increase the execution time for the worst case. For non-real-time applications the typical performance is more important, so lock-free algorithms are good, but for real-time applications the worst-case performance is the most important, which makes lock-free a.k.a. optimistic algorithms bad.
Also neither mutual exclusion nor lock-free/wait-free algorithms have any problem with reentrancy when implemented correctly. Problems with reentrancy appear only in programs where there are mutable variables that are shared between threads and which should not have been shared (like when using some of the old standard C library functions).
It is very common to have a very large number of threads that use reentrantly the same code that implements mutual exclusion for accessing some shared resource that is guarded by a lock.
Re: Intel 80386, a Revolutionary CPU
#158Earlier quoted context omitted.
It was a 386 that Linus Torvalds wrote the first Linux kernel on, and support for the new features of the 386 from the start was one of the reasons Linux took off instantly.
More info: "It uses every conceivable feature of the 386 I could find, as it was also a project to teach me about the 386" https://www.cs.cmu.edu/~awb/linux.history.html
Re: Intel 80386, a Revolutionary CPU
#159Earlier quoted context omitted.
Hmm – the smallest, most highly-integrated PDP-11 (-compatible) package ever made was the QFP 1806VM2, with around ~135k transistors; it integrated MMU, UART, parallel interface, keyboard controller, etc, but did floating-point instructions in interpretive microcode. I think that same transistor count was reached by Motorola on the 68020, which would've been around 1984, but would have needed the peripheral controlle…
1806VM2 wasn't released until late 1980s when there were numerous superior options, even if your yardstick is transistor count (but naturally not in USSR).
Re: Intel 80386, a Revolutionary CPU
#160Earlier quoted context omitted.
The DEC Rainbow would have been fine if they didn't do things like require special floppy disks that cost $5 each. 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.
Thats an interesting alternative history thought experiment. I wonder how early one could capture the complexity of the full PDP-11 microarchitecture on a single chip? Would it have been affordable? What about the support hardware?