Author: Eugene Nalimov
Date: 10:21:38 03/10/00
Go up one level in this thread
On March 10, 2000 at 02:58:24, David Blackman wrote: >On March 09, 2000 at 23:14:52, Robert Hyatt wrote: > >>One thing is for sure, the Motorola "architecture" is so far ahead of Intel, >>with _real_ registers, etc... it was a shame IBM went the wrong way when they >>decided to use the x86. I would _much_ rather be programming 680x0 processors, >>and had their speed driven by the market pressure that has driven Intel. >> >>Programming the 680x0's feels just like programming any well-done architecture >>of the early 80's... lots of instructions, lots of registers, sane instruction >>formats, sane memory addressing modes, etc. None of that early segment horse- >>hockey. :) > >The 680x0 was difficult to implement fast. Especially the 68020 compatible ones. >68020 is one of the reasons people got excited about RISC, whereas the 386 >architecture can be made to go fast more easily (but still not as easy as RISC). > >Of course the 386 is more ugly than a 68020 from a user mode programming point >of view, and the 16 bit Intels were much, much worse. Here I disagree. I wrote compilers for both of them (actually, it was the same portable optimizing backend), and 68k was much more pain because of 2 register classes (addresses and data). Registers on 386 are more or less symmetric (there are 3 exceptions - shift on non-constant amount, divide and 32x32->64 multiply, memory movement instructions; fortunately, those instructions are either slow or not frequent, so extra pushs/moves/pops around them do not slow program a bit). Eugene
This page took 0 seconds to execute
Last modified: Thu, 15 Apr 21 08:11:13 -0700
Current Computer Chess Club Forums at Talkchess. This site by Sean Mintz.