Mark Wendt (Contractor) wrote: > I sysadmin'd a bunch of those behemoth Alpha 8400's. They really > were a joy to administer. DEC did those ones right - we hardly ever > had any hardware maintenance to worry about. Clustering was a > wunnerful thing for system(s) uptime, especially on critical > production machines. Too bad they let that all slip away. > > You are talking about CISC, right? ;-) > > VAX was CISC, but done with a clean sheet, and following and expanding on the general PDP-11 layout.
Alpha was a very clean RISC design. I'm not sure X86 can even be called CISC, more like cobbled abomination. Have you ever heard of Virtual DMA Services on the X86? Doing some digging many years ago, I discovered there is a virtual IBM PC (original 8088, 4 MHz clock, interrupt controller chip, DMA controller chip, etc) implemented in all 386, 486 and Pentium chips. This allows those games that were loaded from DOS but then took over the whole system to be played on Windows 3.1 and later. Yucchhh! So, all the I/o ports and auxilliary chip registers are implemented to virtualize a game's playing with the DMA controller. Jon ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Register Now & Save for Velocity, the Web Performance & Operations Conference from O'Reilly Media. Velocity features a full day of expert-led, hands-on workshops and two days of sessions from industry leaders in dedicated Performance & Operations tracks. Use code vel09scf and Save an extra 15% before 5/3. http://p.sf.net/sfu/velocityconf _______________________________________________ Emc-users mailing list Emc-users@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/emc-users
