Path: utzoo!mnetor!tmsoft!torsqnt!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!cs.utexas.edu!samsung!zaphod.mps.ohio-state.edu!rpi!uupsi!grebyn!ckp
From: ckp@grebyn.com (Checkpoint Technologies)
Newsgroups: comp.arch
Subject: Re: Let's pretend
Keywords: Intel, 586, windows
Message-ID: <24117@grebyn.com>
Date: 18 Dec 90 21:11:53 GMT
References: <3042@crdos1.crd.ge.COM> <1990Dec18.082623.16648@kithrup.COM> <15145@ogicse.ogi.edu>
Reply-To: ckp@grebyn.UUCP (Checkpoint Technologies)
Organization: Grebyn Timesharing, Vienna, VA, USA
Lines: 30

In article <15145@ogicse.ogi.edu> borasky@ogicse.ogi.edu (M. Edward Borasky) writes:
>>In article <3042@crdos1.crd.ge.COM>, davidsen@crdos1.crd.ge.COM (Wm E Davidsen Jr) writes:
>>>  What features should be put into the CPU to improve performance and
>>>reduce chip count?
>I thought the way to improve performance was to REMOVE features!  And

This is *not* an option when you have a significant software base to
protect.  And surely Intel has a gargantuan software base to protect.
Same with the 68K line.

Just think of it.  Intel releases the 586, and to improve performance
they remove a few complex instructions and replace them with one or two
simpler but faster instructions.  No software that used those
instructions will run.  Intel earns a bad rep and sells zero chips as
the journalists take Intel apart for producing an incompatible chip.

BTW: Something I read in a PC mag recently irked me.  Paraphrased, the
author wrote "\"Incompatible\" means that something that's supposed to
work together with something else, doesn't".  Well, by my book
"incompatible" only means that something doesn't work together with
something else, it makes no moral judgement about whether it's supposed
to.  But in the PC world, "incompatible" is taken to mean "bad", "wrong",
"evil".

I just wanted to get that off my chest...
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