By: Patrick Chase (patrickjchase.delete@this.gmail.com), November 20, 2014 11:30 am
Room: Moderated Discussions
Michael S (already5chosen.delete@this.yahoo.com) on November 20, 2014 10:14 am wrote:
> Still, I am surprised that, according to your previous post, Intel was preparing
> Stanford-style RISC ISA. I was under impression that before DEC deal most Intel's RISC
> people were from Berkeley RISC school.
That's certainly true of i960, but it wouldn't surprise me if they'd started to go the opposite direction by the late 90s. After all, they effectively replaced i960 with ARM (XScale) for peripheral and handheld applications.
People love to be snarky about Intel and ISA complexity (and they certainly earned some of that with i432), but completely overlook that they somehow ended up with the one CISC ISA that was simple enough that modern micro-architectural techniques such as superscalar and OoO could be economically applied. VAX, m68k, etc all died out by the mid 80s due to overwhelming complexity.
For that matter, i960 wasn't at all bad (I did a fair bit of FW development on them before we got ARMed). i860 more... problematic but it worked fairly well for what it was designed to do.
> Still, I am surprised that, according to your previous post, Intel was preparing
> Stanford-style RISC ISA. I was under impression that before DEC deal most Intel's RISC
> people were from Berkeley RISC school.
That's certainly true of i960, but it wouldn't surprise me if they'd started to go the opposite direction by the late 90s. After all, they effectively replaced i960 with ARM (XScale) for peripheral and handheld applications.
People love to be snarky about Intel and ISA complexity (and they certainly earned some of that with i432), but completely overlook that they somehow ended up with the one CISC ISA that was simple enough that modern micro-architectural techniques such as superscalar and OoO could be economically applied. VAX, m68k, etc all died out by the mid 80s due to overwhelming complexity.
For that matter, i960 wasn't at all bad (I did a fair bit of FW development on them before we got ARMed). i860 more... problematic but it worked fairly well for what it was designed to do.
