Re:Intel x86 documentation has more pages than the 6502 has ...
by nn3 on Wednesday December 07, 2016 @08:52PM
(#13127822)
If you go by pages in the specification
https://people-mozilla.org/~sstangl/arm/AArch64-Reference-Ma...
is 5183 pages, which is about 10% longer than the Intel manual, which currently has 4670 pages.
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Re:Intel x86 documentation has more pages than the 6502 has ...
by pcwalton on Wednesday December 07, 2016 @10:41PM
(#13128251)
2,036 of those pages are for AArch32, though. In contrast to ARM, AMD didn't introduce a new instruction set for 32-bit x86.
Personally, I prefer ARM's move, because while it's a complexity increase now, it paves the way to someday drop support for 32-bit ARM, which would be a major architectural simplification. It also means that, as a programmer, when you're in 64-bit mode you aren't burdened by all of that weird backwards compatibility stuff going back decades—you get a relatively clean ISA.
(I do have some gripes with AArch64, to be fair: there are too many addressing modes and the condition codes are unnecessary. But I'll take anything that moves us in a more RISC-y direction.)