Intel

And hung onto the Intel '86 architecture a tad too tightly, for far too long.

Joe Gwinn

Yes, it's an ancient dog. It's immensely complex to push the X86 architecture for speed, hence the power consumption and all the bugs.

AMD has been doing it pretty well, for awhile. The X86_64 architecture was theirs, for instance--Intel was still pushing Itanium, alias Itanic.

Cheers

Phil Hobbs

My fave was the NSC800...I usd it in the first (?) all cmos hand held terminal...and the Z80 could do io mapped DRAM, albeit slowly but it worked as a printer buffer!

Altera was founded with Intel money, and the Intel Eprom process. Remember the EP300?

In the last 20 years, Intel processors had nothing to do with the x86 architecture, except that they could accept x86 code after reset. Inside, they are a bunch of RISCs, and there is no EAX register but some 100s of renaming registers that all could take the role of EAX, in case of speculative execution even some of them at the same time.

There haven't been a lot of bugs in the last 40 years. If someone gave up b/c of bugs, it was NS with the 32032 or Motorola with the 68K. That's what you get with addressing modes like multiple-memory-indirect where instructions may never terminate because of unlimited page faults for a single instruction.

All the bugs? Surely you'll mention the fdiv? Has floating point division anything to do with x86 architecture? When I think of bugs, I immediately remember the AM9511 floating point coprocessor. It was next to impossible to get a data sheet and the AM9511 version for it, and every month a different combination with different bugs.

... which really was HP's brainchild. I wonder how the iapx432 would perform with current cache technology.

Gerhard

Yes, the 1802 was great, the address bus was muxed high byte low bytes so interfacing to DRAM was extremely easy.

I never used the 1802 but it did look like a nice architecture to me at the time. Is that the one which stored the return address in the first two addresses of a subroutine or am I thinking of something else?

The PDP-8 stored the return address (12 bit) in the first location of a subroutine.

Many decades ago, I met the Instruction Set Architect of the M68000 family of processor chips. He said that it was inspired by the DEC PDP11 instruction set.

Joe Gwinn

Yes. The PDP-11 was sort of revolutionary.

So do they have any instruction set available to the programmer other than the x86 one or is all this just an emulation of x86 code. Is there a programming model to be seen in some public document describing all those many registers. Last time I (vaguely) checked all I could see were the x86 registers, just made longer - which brings with itself all the limitations the x86 architecture has always had, just going over them faster by faster silicon.

This poor bugger:

Since its peak in 2024, Intel stock has lost 2/3 of its value.

About 1/3rd of that in the past 3 days..

Sorry, I meant 2022.

Intel is like Kodak and Polaroid and Xerox, fixated on their own aging technology. Intel missed the boat big-time on EUV, so it's hilarious that they project big revenues in the foundry business.

Intel has done $152 billion in stock buybacks, instead of investing in their own business. Now they need government subsidies.

Of course it would be even easier to wipe out the United Provinces of the Netherlands - you don't even need nukes to blow holes in a few dikes, and the sea will do the rest.

Submerge ASML and the western chip industry is down the tubes.

Their GPU business is struggling also, which is too bad as their Arc GPUs are pretty good for the price, particularly for video editing and transcoding.

I bought an Arc 580 for my A/V editing machine and for $169 on sale it was a no brainer:

It has some bug that makes it have high idle power consumption in some setups including mine, 35 watts, which is absurd by modern standards. None of the fixes seem to work. The price of early adoption but the PC is asleep most of the time, anyway.

It's hilarious what a "low-end" GPU looks like these days, with _14_ power pins, about a foot and a half long and would break your foot if you dropped it on it.

A lot of countries are buying F35s.