Comments on: Know Your Roots: Optimizing for the 286 and 386

By: Larry Osterman

Larry Osterman — Wed, 07 Feb 2007 22:33:20 +0000

Back in the day, we had a simple rule: Except for multiply and divide (which cost hundreds of clocks), the performance of a piece of code is directly proportional to the number of bytes it occupies.

That was it. This metric worked all the way up until basically the 486 series of processors (when the prefetch algorithms got smart enough to defeat that simple metric.

The reason was that memory cost overwhelmed processor cost on those old machines.

By: Mark

Mark — Wed, 07 Feb 2007 16:28:28 +0000

I think there are actually precious few good reasons to switch away from x86.

I certainly don’t think Microsoft and Apple are stopping us.

Microsoft has, at least once, ported their entire OS to a new ISA (Alpha). And Apple is the *king* of this kind of thing. They’ve done it twice, most recently *to* x86 (away from the “newer” and “better put together” PPC).

I’d be interested to hear your arguments in favor of a switch.

By: veridicus

veridicus — Wed, 07 Feb 2007 16:08:10 +0000

Granted, x86 is ugly due to legacy. But it’s time something completely new and much better is put together for general computing. It’s getting up-front support from MS and/or Apple that would be the dealbreaker, which is the only reason we’re still on x86.