[Info-vax] Chinese Alpha?

[glen herrmannsfeldt]

Bob Koehler <koehler at eisner.nospam.encompasserve.org> wrote:

(snip)
>   8086 inherits archiecture lessons from the 4 bit 4004 via the 8 bit 
>   8008.  But current IA32 inherits actual instructions from 8086.  8 bit 
>   register instructions were part of the 32 bit 80386 and and 486, and
>   I think they are still supported.

The 8086 inherits instructions from the 8080, but the actual opcodes
have changed. You can map the 8080 registers onto the appropriate
8086 registers, and rewrite assembly source using new assembly
opcodes, assemble the result, and run it.

>   Alpha inherits lessons learned from 16 bit PDP-11, 32 bit VAX, and
>   36 bit PDP-10.  I suspect there are lessons learned from other PDP
>   and I think I see a few things from IBM 360.  But it does not inherit 
>   instructions from any of those processors.

I think I believe that. Without going through them one at a
time, though, I wouldn't be so sure that there weren't any.

Using only 32 and 64 bit load/store made it pretty different
from the previous processors. 

-- glen