The x86 architecture is the weirdo (2004)

Re:The x86 architecture is the weirdo (2004) by tabtab on Tuesday April 19, 2022 @07:48PM (#31090899)

x86 is a hack on top of a chip design that was originally intended as a low-cost calculator CPU that gradually grew up to power big-iron servers. Most of its competitors were designed for medium or large computers from the get-go, so had far less backward-compatibility baggage to deal with.

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Re:The x86 architecture is the weirdo (2004) by thedeadfish on Tuesday April 19, 2022 @08:15PM (#31091145)

Not at all, the original 16bit x86 was well designed. The 32bit extensions were pretty decent too. Its not until much later that it really started to turn to shit. The real disaster started when Intel started haphazardly adding terribly thought out SIMD instructions. AMD64 truly sucks though, this is where the original encoding should have been replaced.

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Re:The x86 architecture is the weirdo (2004) by tabtab on Wednesday April 20, 2022 @12:16PM (#31099180)

The 16bit chip had to be backward compatible with the 8bit, no?

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Re:The x86 architecture is the weirdo (2004) by thedeadfish on Wednesday April 20, 2022 @03:07PM (#31101494)

Kind of but not really, whilst it shares some design choices, the 8086 is neither source or binary compatible with the 8080.

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