I hope some day the tedious part of what you do, can be automated (AI?), so that you (or others) can spend their time on whatever aspect is most interesting. Vs all the grunt work needed to get to a point where you understand what you're looking at.
Btw. any 4 bit cpus/uC's in your collection? Back in the day I had a small databook (OKI, early '90s iirc) that had a bunch of those. These seem to have sort of disappeared (eg. never saw a pdf of that particular databook on sites like Bitsavers).
Now we get like 2x in a decade (single core).
I'm speaking of e.g. the leap between the IBM PC in 1981 and the Compaq 386 five years later.
Or between that and the 486 another five years later or so.
Imagine how it felt going from an 8086 @ 8 MHz to an 80486SX (the cheapo version without FPU) @ 33 MHz. With blazingly fast REP MOVSD over some form of proto local bus Compaq implemented using a Tseng Labs ET4000/W32i vga chip.
I think a bigger challenge back then was the lack of software that could take advantage of it. Given the nascent state of the industry, lots of folks wrote for the 'lowest common denominator' and kept it at that (i.e. expense of hardware to test things like changing routines used based on CPU sniffing.)
And even then of course sometimes folks were lazy. One of my (least) favorite examples of this is the PC 'version' (It's not at all the original) of Mega Man 3. On a 486/33 you had the option of it being almost impossible twitchy fast, or dog slow thanks to turbo button. Or, the fun thing where Turbo Pascal compiled apps could start crapping out if CPU was too fast...
Sorry, I digress. the 386 was a seemingly small step that was actually a leap forward. Folks just had to catch up.
This was a huge boost for a lot of my 3D rendering code, despite the prefix not being free compared to pure 32-bit mode.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cyrix_Cx486DLC
[2]: http://www.c-jump.com/CIS77/ASM/DataTypes/T77_0030_allocatio...
The 286 in the benchmark was using 60ns Siemens ram, and a 25mhz unit which virtually no one has ever seen in the wild. 286's that people actually bought topped out at 12mhz.
The 386 in the test was using 70ns ram.
Lets see them both with 60ns ram.
My 4th gen intel haswell machine had 8gb of ram, then i upgraded to amd zen2 with 16gb ram.
After that i upgraded to zen3+ with 32gb ram, and currently my laptop is zen4 with 64gb of ddr5 ram.
In this writeup, something that jumps out at me is the use of the equality bus, and Manchester carry chain, and I'm sure there are more similar tricks to do things quickly.
When did the transition happen? Or were the shortcuts always used, and the naive implementations exist only in textbooks?
Clock dividers (for example, for PLLs and for generating sampling clocks) commonly use simple ripple carry because nobody is looking at multiple bits at a time.
Having said that there was no operating system for it. All that 32 bit power just got used for faster DOS and sometimes concurrent DOS.
It’s weird to think how long it took for the operating systems to be developed for it.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OS/2#1990:_Breakup
> OS/2 1.x targets the Intel 80286 processor and DOS fundamentally does not. IBM insisted on supporting the 80286 processor, with its 16-bit segmented memory mode, because of commitments made to customers who had purchased many 80286-based PS/2s as a result of IBM's promises surrounding OS/2.[30] Until release 2.0 in April 1992, OS/2 ran in 16-bit protected mode and therefore could not benefit from the Intel 80386's much simpler 32-bit flat memory model and virtual 8086 mode features. This was especially painful in providing support for DOS applications. While, in 1988, Windows/386 2.1 could run several cooperatively multitasked DOS applications, including expanded memory (EMS) emulation, OS/2 1.3, released in 1991, was still limited to one 640 kB "DOS box".
> Given these issues, Microsoft started to work in parallel on a version of Windows which was more future-oriented and more portable. The hiring of Dave Cutler, former VAX/VMS architect, in 1988 created an immediate competition with the OS/2 team, as Cutler did not think much of the OS/2 technology and wanted to build on his work on the MICA project at Digital rather than creating a "DOS plus". His NT OS/2 was a completely new architecture.[31]
DOS extenders had started in the 1980's but they weren't a real OS but I would barely call DOS an OS either.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DOS_extender
But Unix was ported to the 386 in 1987.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xenix#Transfer_of_ownership_to...
> In 1987, SCO ported Xenix to the 386 processor, a 32-bit chip, after securing knowledge from Microsoft insiders that Microsoft was no longer developing Xenix.[41] Xenix System V Release 2.3.1 introduced support for i386, SCSI and TCP/IP. SCO's Xenix System V/386 was the first 32-bit operating system available on the market for the x86 CPU architecture.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xenix
I had friends running Linux from the very beginning in 1991.
kens•9mo ago
neuroelectron•9mo ago
kens•9mo ago
neuroelectron•9mo ago
kens•9mo ago
neuroelectron•9mo ago
specialist•9mo ago
Too bad (for the Navajo Nation) about the armed standoff and its aftermath.
guerrilla•9mo ago
sitkack•9mo ago
Do they ever put a solid metal top layer?
kens•9mo ago
I haven't seen any chips with a solid metal top layer, since that wouldn't be very useful. Some chips have thick power and ground distribution on the top layer, so the top is essentially solid. Secure chips often cover the top layer with a wire that goes back and forth, so the wire will break if you try to get underneath for probing.
bgnn•9mo ago
HappMacDonald•9mo ago
sitkack•9mo ago
The AMD 29000 series, a RISC chip with many architectural advances that eventually morphed into the K5.
And the Inmos Transputer, a Forth like chip with built in scheduling and networking, designed to be networked together into large systems.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AMD_Am29000
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transputer
kens•9mo ago
Zeetah•9mo ago
moosedev•9mo ago
dboreham•9mo ago
kragen•9mo ago
sitkack•9mo ago
This would make concrete and bring coherence to the grab bag of skills and experience I have. Though I think it would be 10x as much in a small group setting. It is like trying to recover the source code a binary where you don't even know the source language.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M3nFcTpAwoM&list=PLUg3wIOWD8...
kragen•9mo ago
anyfoo•9mo ago
leeter•9mo ago
adrian_b•9mo ago
Moreover there was only a small time interval when 286 and 386SX overlapped in clock frequency. In later years 286 could be found only at 12 MHz or 16 MHz, while 386SX was available at 25 MHz or 33 MHz, so 386SX was noticeably faster at running any program.
Rewriting or recompiling a program as a 32-bit executable could gain a lot of performance, but it is true that in the early years of 386DX and 386SX most users were still using 16-bit MS-DOS applications.
bananaboy•9mo ago
rogerbinns•9mo ago