Date: Wed, 20 May 1998 20:40:00 -0700 From: Soren Kristensen <soekris@alameda.net> To: hackers@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: Original PC and talk Message-ID: <3563A210.31CF@alameda.net>
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Lets get it clear why IBM choose the 8088: The PC design team wanted more than a 8 bit CPU in their new PC, but they didn't want to go to full 16 bit, as most peripheral chips (especially cheap ones) at that time was 8 bit and DRAM was only avaliable in x1 types. (IBM actually planned to release a machine with only 16 kbyte....) And at the time the decision was made, sometime around 1980, the only avaliable chip that fit their need was Intel's 8088. Motorola only had the 68000 avaliable, 68008, the 8 bit bus version, came later. But IBM was also using the 8086 in their Displaywriter Word Processor, which may have influenced the choice. (Funny machine with big 8 inch floppies, I once played with cp/m-86 on it :-) So that's why we are stuck with the x86 family, like it or not. But I don't think it is as bad as a lot a people make it. It don't have a nice architecture (anybody remember the great 32000 series from national semiconductor ?), but the x86 is quite powerfull in assembler (my favorite progamming language....), even with its limited number of registers. And who writes code in assembler anymore ? And with todays chips sizes the underlying processor architecture dosn't matter so much anyway, it's more a matter of cache sizes and memory bandwidth. There was actually a short time where the new Pentium Pro-200 was the fastest processor in the world, measured in specint95 and specfp95.... Best Regards, Soren Kristensen To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-hackers" in the body of the message
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