Replies to post #12491 on Advanced Micro Devices Inc (AMD)

[wbmw]

Sgolds, Re: so you think the x86 product line is crap?

You are confusing the architecture with the design. Designs such as Pentium M are among the finest ever to hit the market, but they are still being held back by an ISA that's more than 2 decades old. Intel has been trying hard to reduce the amount of legacy support; for example, real mode applications and drivers have been wiped out, and the number of applications that use the A20 line for wrapping memory no longer exist for the majority of users. Along with these extinctions goes some of the major drawbacks of the x86 architecture, but many still remain.

Leading these drawbacks is the decode logic necessary to translate x86 instructions into RISC like micro-ops. The variable byte lengths of x86 require a lot of logic and the decoders are slow and take up several pipeline stages. They are among the largest power dissipaters of the chip, and they slow down the overall performance.

Intel should be able to take IPF and make even lower power chips than Banias, and maybe we will see such chips in the Tanglewood time frame. After all, if Intel and the ex-Alpha engineers can make a 16-core chip with the same power dissipation of a current Itanium 2 processor (107W TDP), they should be able to make a quad core version with just under 27W TDP. That would run circles around any processor based on x86.

[chipguy]

I consider the Pentium Pro architecture - which still persists (in updated form) in the newer Centrino Pentium-M - to be the greatest processor design in the industry's history!


Perhaps you should try to understand the difference between
architecture and implementation. There have been many really
technically outstanding and ingenius implementations of the
x86 ISA but the ISA still sucks dead rhinos.

BTW, do you think standards like NTSC-525 and 12 Volt auto
power are standards because they are objectively better than
all the alternatives? They are standards because they are too
entrenched to replace with better, more modern replacements
except gradually over decades. Same for x86.

Think of it: This is the architecture that buried Alpha, mips, 68000, Vax, every mainframe design and drove HP to cooperate with Intel in designing a replacement for HP-Parc.


Wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong and wrong.

IPF buried Alpha, MIPS is still going strong in the embedded
control market (IPF killed it for servers etc), the 68k and
VAX were buried by RISCs (primarily SPARC), the S/390 and
z-series mainframes are still going strong, and x86 had
nothing to do with why HP teamed up with Intel (HP didn't
want to fab its own chips beyond 0.5 um).

it is also easy to manufacture and way more reliable than competing products - hardware failures are almost unknown!

Oh man, now I know you are trolling...