Subj : Re: X86S
To   : tenser
From : Nightfox
Date : Wed Apr 24 2024 12:55 pm

  Re: Re: X86S
  By: tenser to Spectre on Thu Apr 25 2024 07:46 am

 te> AMD led quite the coup with x86_64.  What happened there was that Digital
 te> Equipment Corporation was in its death throes, and they hemorrhaged some
 te> of their best Alpha designers (Alpha, at the time, was the fastest
 te> microprocessor in the world) to AMD.  At the time, Intel was pushing
 te> Itanium hard, and refused to entertain the idea of a 64-bit x86.  This
 te> extraordinarily  talented team, now at AMD, didn't want to futz about with
 te> an also-ran x86 clone, so they came up with x86_64.  It was fast,
 te> supported a large virtual address space (x86 had had PAE for several years
 te> by then, so they already had a large physical address space), and retained
 te> compatibility with 32-bit x86 applications.

 te> That was kind of what the OEMs all wanted, which meant that the desktop
 te> market and low-end servers all went x86_64, and Itanium was relegated to
 te> the high-end, where it only had marginal market penetration.  Eventually,
 te> x86_64 took over there, too (at least by volume), in part thanks to the
 te> hyperscalars paving the way for large-scale x86 deployment in server
 te> environments.

I think it's interesting that it happened that way.  I think moving forward while maintaining backward compatibility has been an advantage with x86 processors.

Apple seems to have the opposite strategy, where they have no problem swapping out the processor in their Mac lineup to something entirely different.  They've done that several times in the history of the Mac.  I've done some software development work on an M1 Mac not too long ago, and one of the frustrations was having to use its x86 emulation sometimes to do some builds, as there were some 3rd-party software libraries that were still only supporting x86 and didn't support M1 yet.

Nightfox
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