Homebrew Amiga Graphics Card (FPGA, Open Source) Finished [video]

Re:Homebrew Amiga Graphics Card (FPGA, Open Source) Finished... by gpderetta on Monday February 06, 2017 @09:55AM (#13579908)

I'm not an expert, but as far as I understand, what killed 68k (and many 80s CISCs, like VAX), was the difficulty with producing an OoO implementation given the very complex instruction semantics, in particular the with indirect addressing modes.

It wouldn't be a problem today as designers have transistors to spare, but it was in the early '90s, when the high performance market was taken over by the simpler OoO RISCs and x86 [1] of which, against expectations, Intel managed to build a competitive OoO implementation in the form of the PentiumPro.

[1] which compared to other CISCs is much simpler.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Homebrew Amiga Graphics Card (FPGA, Open Source) Finished... by cmrdporcupine on Monday February 06, 2017 @10:42AM (#13580431)

They ended up solving this problem eventually with ColdFire. They dropped a few instructions and addressing modes and were able to produce something pretty performant. But just 15 years too late :-)

And now that's dead too. And yeah I think the engineers at Motorola in the 90s basically just saw the RISC writing on the wall and threw up their hands and said that was the way to go, customers be damned, meanwhile Intel just had too much invested in x86 CISC and couldn't do that and so was forced to make it work.

[ Parent | on HN ]