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From: mroussel@alchemy.chem.utoronto.ca (Marc Roussel)
Subject: Re: When will the 8088 die?
Message-ID: <1990Dec3.024326.22956@alchemy.chem.utoronto.ca>
Organization: Department of Chemistry, University of Toronto
References: <90335.202651F0O@psuvm.psu.edu>
Date: Mon, 3 Dec 90 02:43:26 GMT

In article <90335.202651F0O@psuvm.psu.edu> F0O@psuvm.psu.edu writes:
>    I've been wondering since the 486 chips are out now, when is intel and
>others going to stop making the 8088?  The 286 is much better then the 8088
>and for all the more a 286 is in price, I would have thought the 8088 would
>be dead by now.
     Except when there is a radical change in technology, chips are
almost never discontinued, they just find new uses.  Take the 6502 for
instance.  Once it was the CPU of choice for many small computer
designers; now it's a coprocessor on the top of the line Mac's.

>    I also hope that when Intel designs the 686 chip, it will be backward
>compatible to the 286, not the 8088(the 586 will be backward compatible to
>the 8088).  I'm not sure how easy this would be to do, since the 286
>instruction set is a superset of the 8088, but I do think the 286 should be
>the base for the 686 and up.
     This comment really piqued my curiosity... Since the 286
instruction set is a superset of the 8088's, how do you propose that
Intel make a chip whose instruction set is a superset of the former's
without including the instructions of the latter's?  Furthermore, what
possible purpose could it serve to deliberately screw up backward
compatibility in such a way?

				Marc R. Roussel
                                mroussel@alchemy.chem.utoronto.ca