Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!samsung!zaphod.mps.ohio-state.edu!wuarchive!texbell!ficc!peter From: peter@ficc.ferranti.com (Peter da Silva) Newsgroups: comp.arch Subject: Re: Speed Kills Message-ID: <-Y94H67@xds13.ferranti.com> Date: 27 Jun 90 13:46:49 GMT References: <447@garth.UUCP> <4040@taux01.nsc.com> <502@garth.UUCP> <62863@sgi.sgi.com> Reply-To: peter@ficc.ferranti.com (Peter da Silva) Distribution: comp Organization: Xenix Support, FICC Lines: 23 In article <62863@sgi.sgi.com> karsh@trifolium.sgi.com (Bruce Karsh) and in article <502@garth.UUCP> fouts@bozeman.ingr.com (Martin Fouts) are using the word "lifespan" to mean different things: Martin: > I would like to see proposals for architectures with reasonable > extended lifetimes and software tools [...] Moto has done a reasonable > job with the 68K. Bruce: > The lifespan of a computer architecture is mostly determined by the amount > of commercial software available for it. The [...] Intel 8086 series... Bruce is talking about how long the chip family sells. From this viewpoint, the intel 80x86 family is likely to be considered a success. Martin is talking about how long software written for one member of the family can be considered to be making reasonably good use of the leading edge. Martin wants to encourage chips that don't require new operating systems every N years just to take advantage of the top-end chips. Really, it's debatable whether the 80386 is even using the same architecture as the 8088. It emulates the silly thing, and has a similar instruction set, but the differences between 386 and 86 mode are pretty fundamental. -- Peter da Silva. `-_-' +1 713 274 5180.