Here's an interesting paper on "The History on the Microcomputer -
Invention and Evolution"
http://www.xnumber.com/xnumber/Microcomputer_invention.htm
It even has pictures of the 4004 series chips.
The section describing the 8086 design states "it was constrained to be
upwardly compatible with the 8080 (and 8008)"
Jack
Christopher Smith wrote:
Tracy R Reed wrote:
Andrew Lentvorski wrote:
Also, interrupts on a normal x86 system pass through a bunch of
chips before actually hitting the processor in order to handle
"legacy" issues. Those are normally quite slow, as well.
I think it was you who told me one night at Denny's a few months ago
that an x86 chip spends a third of its power budget in decode because
of how complicated the instruction set is, largely to legacy issues.
I believe that data is old. The x86 decode transistor budget has
remain fixed, while CPU transistor budgets have increased. Last time I
checked (which was a while ago), it was down to 15%.
--Chris
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