>Well, playing Devil's Advocate for a moment...
Sounds like fun. ;-) With my computer going haywire (Right now, I'm on mu
'auxiliary' 486 computer... I suspect a virus, but my antivius software
didn't find one, but I don't really trust it. I only really trust it if it
find a virus...)
>Pretend you're Intel. (Only smarter.) How would YOU make a low cost
>version of the 8086, in a non-bone-headed way?
Slower clock speeds. This means that you literally can have a plug in
upgrade. You could also make one with a larger micron process and more
vertical and not worry about heating, but that gets to be bone headed. A
better idea would be to learn from competitors, and start making a more
economical way of producing chips.
But I see your point... but remember, before being used on the IBM PC the
8088 had been on the market for 3 years, and probably in OEM's hands a year
before that.
>The 386?
Lower clock speeds... kind of a all-solving solution.
>The 486?
The 486 was just plain dumb. You didn't really need a 486SX at all. You
could keep on making a 386, but Intel was afraid of AMD catching up to them
(with their 40MHz 386's and all). You could have also made a 386 to go in
a 486 socket.
>The Pentium II?
The Celeron was actually a pretty good idea, too good. They should have
made the 128K cache at half clock speed like in the PII. A Celeron 333
will perform better than a PII 300 in the same system, and you can
overclock the Celeron to compete with almost all Intel processors.
>Bear in mind that you've already done all of the expensive engineering
>necessary for the expensive full-performance processors; those are sunk
>costs. But now you want to offer a lower-priced processor, without
>seriously diminshing sales of your full price model.
You make a bone headed one, to keep your 'get me a computer now' segment
happy, possibly gaining repeat customers, and you keep prices high on your
upper model saying 'well... sure, but look at this performance! It really
is aimed at...)
>It's not a simple problem with an easy answer. I'm very reluctant to
>claim that Intel did it wrong.
Well, they did have a lot of proffessionals a lot smarter than I am working
on the problem, and I'm willing to bet they had good ideas, but may have
been shot down somewhere between 'cost' and 'competion'.
>And in case you're wondering, no, I've never worked for Intel. I
>personally find the x86 architecture revolting. Despite that, I have a
I'll say that I don't really like it, and that we could have done much
better. MIPS, SPARC, Alpha, all better than x86, and if they had
competition like the x86 market does, then it'd be a good assumption to
guess that the cost might even be halfed and performance considerably faster.
>great deal of respect for the engineers that managed to take a toaster
>controller from1978 and turn it into a world-class 32-bit superscalar
>processor. Imaginewhat they could have accomplished if they'd started
>from a GOOD architecture.
Well, I'm glad that Merced means the end to this lousy architecture. It
wasn't until this year that we began seriouly getting rid of ISA, which,
aside from going from 8 to 16 bit, hasn't changed all that much since the
days of the XT. Note this is good for the collector side of me, but very
bad for the 'innovative, creative, etc.' side of me.
>Eric
Tim
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Received on Mon Dec 28 1998 - 00:48:14 GMT