Dear Adam, dear Jaromil, dear listeners, Jaromil - 21.06.18, 09:12: > On Wed, 20 Jun 2018, Adam Borowski wrote: > > x86 on the other hand has variable size of opcodes, 1 to 15 bytes. > > This, by the way, is the biggest flaw of x86 instruction set: the > > rules to split code into opcodes are extremely hairy, requiring all > > the decoding work to be done twice if you want a pipeline. > > Wholeheartedly agreeing with you here. > > Sorry if I interrupd (nice thread!) but couldn't resist to nod louder.
From what I learned and read over the years, just about any other CPU architecture other than than x86 is both conceptually and technically more sound than x86. I started with C-64 (6510) and Amiga (68000 up to 68060, then PowerPC) computers. All three have a quite clean and simple machine code from what I can tell. You could even see it in assembly listings. Granted 6510 is quite limited with amount of registers, but simple and clean it is. Also regarding software: AmigaOS was so beyond MS-DOS and early Windows stuff that was available on IBM-PC compatibles that I could start with a long, long list about what was better. Just about everything like true multi tasking, a hard disk partitioning scheme that actually made some sense instead of the MBR crap, multimedia before the word for it was born… you name it. For whatever reason one of the CPU worst architectures and operating systems became standard. And from what I know the CPU architecture still carries most of the crap of the older days after Intel failed with Itanium AFAIK mostly for compatibility reasons as Windows did not run on it initially. So AMD continued the crap with a compatible 64-Bit standard, that Intel also adopted. Our current standard computers are built on a mountain of legacy crap. I follow RISC-V progress and I really like to buy a laptop with something like that. Seeing what happens in Computer hardware space, I say: It is time for true excellence again. Time for people to make hardware not only in order to get money from customers… but for the joy of creating something that really delivers from the inside out. Capitalism did not help to improve the quality of hardware, just the quantity and the speed of it. Ok, I am finished with my rant. In case you ever notice a truly open as in freedom RISC-V or other suitable architecture laptop or other small computer usable for NAS or so crowd funding project, maybe also ARM64 or PowerPC, please tell me. Even without Intel Management Engine and with Coreboot, I´d rather not put money into an x86 based machine again. I eventually will anyway due to lack of alternatives, especially for laptops, but I´d rather not. And of course I know: I can always choose to do something about it. For now I have other priorities, so I just stick with the hardware I currently use. Thanks, -- Martin _______________________________________________ Dng mailing list [email protected] https://mailinglists.dyne.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/dng
