Jerome H. Fine wrote:
>>Jim Kearney wrote:
>>
>>
>
>
>
>>I just had an email exchange with someone at Intel's Museum
>>(http://www.intel.com/intel/intelis/museum/index.htm)
>>
>>
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>Jerome Fine replies:
>
>I am not sure why the information is so blatant in its
>stupid attempt to ignore anything but Intel hardware
>as far a anything that even look like a CPU chip, but
>I guess it is an "Intel" museum.
>
>Of course, even now, Intel, in my opinion, is so far
>behind from a technical point of view that is is a sad
>comment just to read about the products that were
>way behind, and still are, the excellence of other
>products. No question that if the Pentium 4 had been
>produced 10 years ago, it would have been a major
>accomplishment.
>
Harsh! :)
Guess it depends on what you mean by "far behind from a
technical point of view."
If you mean that x86 is an ugly legacy architecture, with
not nearly enough registers, an instruction set which
doesn't fit any reasonable pipeline, that's ugly to decode
and not particularly orthogonal, that from purely technical
reasons ought to have died a timely death in 1990,
I'd have to agree.
However, look at the performance. P4 is up near the
top of the tree with the best RISC CPUs, which have
the advantage of clean design and careful evolution.
It surely takes a great deal of inspiration, creativity,
and engineering talent to take something as ill-suited
as the x86 architecture and get this kind of performance
out of it. IMHO.
In other words, making x86 fast must be a lot like
getting Dumbo off the air. That ought to count as
some kind of technical achievement. :)
Imagine if the same amount of effort was applied
to a sensible machine, like MIPS, Alpha, or ARM!
Or even a 64 bit-wide Z80 :)
-- Ross
>
>Sincerely yours,
>
>Jerome Fine
>--
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Received on Tue Oct 08 2002 - 20:15:47 BST