[Info-vax] Three boot camp sessions on YouTube

[Neil Rieck]

On Tuesday, October 11, 2016 at 2:44:10 PM UTC-4, Simon Clubley wrote:
> On 2016-10-07, Camiel Vanderhoeven <iamcamiel at gmail.com> wrote:
> >
> > Well, there are similarities and differences between x86 and all of
> > the previous architectures:
> >
> > x86 is a lot like VAX when you look at its instruction set
> 
> Except of course (as you also pointed out in one of the videos)
> the x86 has lots of special purpose registers unlike the VAX where
> the registers are general purpose registers.
> 
> I've done x86 assembly language programming in the past. It wasn't
> a pleasant experience, especially when compared to the likes of
> ARM or even (to a lesser extent) MIPS.
> 
> BTW, I noticed on one of your graphs that you have MIPS marked as
> EOL. Has MIPS development actually ceased now (because I'm still
> seeing it around in various places) ?
> 
> Microchip still have the PIC32 range which are low end MIPS cores.
> 
> Simon.
> 
> -- 
> Simon Clubley, clubley at remove_me.eisner.decus.org-Earth.UFP
> Microsoft: Bringing you 1980s technology to a 21st century world

For me, the big difference between Alpha and Itanium in those videos was the register count (32 vs. 128).  Having 128 registers may have seemed like a good idea when they were designing that chip, but we all know that an OS is going to require some/all those registers to be periodically saved then restored (well, not all on every interrupt). I wonder if Intel would have implemented 128 had they known that dynamic memory technology would keep improving as it has. 
 
So with the shift back to x86, the maximum number of registers appears to be moving to a more manageable number.
 
Neil Rieck
Waterloo, Ontario, Canada.
http://www3.sympatico.ca/n.rieck/