Re: X86S
By: fusion to All on Thu Apr 18 2024 07:09 pm

We spoke here previously about DOS support after 2038.. it would seem we have another potential enemy in the form of a proposal from Intel :)

https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/developer/articles/technical/envisio nin g-future-simplified-architecture.html

Funny how they refer to it as "Intel 64 mode" when AMD actually invented it.
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On 22 Apr 2024 at 08:29p, Digital Man pondered and said...

Funny how they refer to it as "Intel 64 mode" when AMD actually invented it. --

I actually blame DEC. If they hadn't let most of their Alpha
team decamp for AMD, the world would be very different today.

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Re: X86S
By: Digital Man to fusion on Mon Apr 22 2024 08:29 pm

https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/developer/articles/technical/envisi
o nin g-future-simplified-architecture.html

Funny how they refer to it as "Intel 64 mode" when AMD actually invented it.

I've seen it refered to as "AMD64" fairly often, and sometimes I've seen people confused about whether something built for AMD64 will run on an Intel system. Even some people I worked with at Intel were sometimes confused about that (sometimes we'd download Linux ISOs to install on some of our test systems, and they were often labeled as x86 or AMD64).

Nightfox
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Re: X86S
By: Nightfox to Digital Man on Tue Apr 23 2024 09:38 am

Re: X86S
By: Digital Man to fusion on Mon Apr 22 2024 08:29 pm

https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/developer/articles/technical/envisi
o nin g-future-simplified-architecture.html

Funny how they refer to it as "Intel 64 mode" when AMD actually invented it.

I've seen it refered to as "AMD64" fairly often, and sometimes I've seen people confused about whether something built for AMD64 will run on an Intel system. Even some people I worked with at Intel were sometimes confused about that (sometimes we'd download Linux ISOs to install on some of our test systems, and they were often labeled as x86 or AMD64).

Yeah, that's because AMD did it first and Intel followed. FreeBSD (at least) still refers to the x86_64 architecture as "amd64" everywhere. I prefer just to refer to it as "x64" and certainly never "Intel 64" - that would just be misattribution (though the base archicture/instruction set was definitely created by Intel). But Intel had its go with the Itanium (IA64) architecture, which flopped, so if they want to claim invention/ownership of a 64-bit PC/server architecture, they should claim that one.
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Re: X86S
By: Digital Man to Nightfox on Tue Apr 23 2024 11:24 am

of our test systems, and they were often labeled as x86 or AMD64).

Yeah, that's because AMD did it first and Intel followed. FreeBSD (at least) still refers to the x86_64 architecture as "amd64" everywhere. I prefer just to refer to it as "x64" and certainly never "Intel 64" - that

Yep. I also prefer to call it x64 (or x86_64).

was definitely created by Intel). But Intel had its go with the Itanium (IA64) architecture, which flopped, so if they want to claim invention/ownership of a 64-bit PC/server architecture, they should claim that one.

Yeah, I remember hearing about the Itanium.

Nightfox
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Yeah, that's because AMD did it first and Intel followed. FreeBSD (at least) still refers to the x86_64 architecture as "amd64" everywhere. I prefer just to refer to it as "x64" and certainly never "Intel 64" - that would just be misattribution (though the base archicture/instruction set was definitely created by Intel). But Intel had its go with the Itanium (IA64) architecture, which flopped, so if they want to claim

Was going to point out as I started reading, the Itanium arrived first, I
don't remember seeing it for anything other than server class hardware, and everything had to be re-written/compiled for it. Where as AMD64 was more an extension for X32 and was backwardly compatible.

Spec


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Re: X86S
By: Spectre to Digital Man on Wed Apr 24 2024 12:09 pm

Was going to point out as I started reading, the Itanium arrived first, I don't remember seeing it for anything other than server class hardware, and everything had to be re-written/compiled for it. Where as AMD64 was more an extension for X32 and was backwardly compatible.

I know I'm just being pedantic, but the 32-bit mode is called x86, not x32. I think the name comes from Intel's early processor, the 8086.

Nightfox
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On 24 Apr 2024 at 12:09p, Spectre pondered and said...

Was going to point out as I started reading, the Itanium arrived first, I don't remember seeing it for anything other than server class hardware, and everything had to be re-written/compiled for it. Where as AMD64 was more an extension for X32 and was backwardly compatible.

The big problem with Itanium is that it was predicated
on having really, really smart compilers that could do
the instruction scheduling (it was VLIW). Those never
materialized, so it never lived up to its performance
potential.

AMD led quite the coup with x86_64. What happened there
was that Digital Equipment Corporation was in its death
throes, and they hemorrhaged some of their best Alpha
designers (Alpha, at the time, was the fastest microprocessor
in the world) to AMD. At the time, Intel was pushing
Itanium hard, and refused to entertain the idea of a
64-bit x86. This extraordinarily talented team, now at
AMD, didn't want to futz about with an also-ran x86 clone,
so they came up with x86_64. It was fast, supported a
large virtual address space (x86 had had PAE for several
years by then, so they already had a large physical address
space), and retained compatibility with 32-bit x86
applications.

That was kind of what the OEMs all wanted, which meant that
the desktop market and low-end servers all went x86_64, and
Itanium was relegated to the high-end, where it only had
marginal market penetration. Eventually, x86_64 took over
there, too (at least by volume), in part thanks to the
hyperscalars paving the way for large-scale x86 deployment
in server environments.

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Re: Re: X86S
By: tenser to Spectre on Thu Apr 25 2024 07:46 am

AMD led quite the coup with x86_64. What happened there was that Digital Equipment Corporation was in its death throes, and they hemorrhaged some of their best Alpha designers (Alpha, at the time, was the fastest microprocessor in the world) to AMD. At the time, Intel was pushing Itanium hard, and refused to entertain the idea of a 64-bit x86. This extraordinarily talented team, now at AMD, didn't want to futz about with an also-ran x86 clone, so they came up with x86_64. It was fast, supported a large virtual address space (x86 had had PAE for several years by then, so they already had a large physical address space), and retained compatibility with 32-bit x86 applications.

That was kind of what the OEMs all wanted, which meant that the desktop market and low-end servers all went x86_64, and Itanium was relegated to the high-end, where it only had marginal market penetration. Eventually, x86_64 took over there, too (at least by volume), in part thanks to the hyperscalars paving the way for large-scale x86 deployment in server environments.

I think it's interesting that it happened that way. I think moving forward while maintaining backward compatibility has been an advantage with x86 processors.

Apple seems to have the opposite strategy, where they have no problem swapping out the processor in their Mac lineup to something entirely different. They've done that several times in the history of the Mac. I've done some software development work on an M1 Mac not too long ago, and one of the frustrations was having to use its x86 emulation sometimes to do some builds, as there were some 3rd-party software libraries that were still only supporting x86 and didn't support M1 yet.

Nightfox
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On 24 Apr 2024 at 09:46a, Nightfox pondered and said...

Was going to point out as I started reading, the Itanium arrived firs don't remember seeing it for anything other than server class hardwar and everything had to be re-written/compiled for it. Where as AMD64 more an extension for X32 and was backwardly compatible.

I know I'm just being pedantic, but the 32-bit mode is called x86, not x32. I think the name comes from Intel's early processor, the 8086.

If you _really_ want to be pedantic about it, Intel calls the
32-bit environment "IA-32e compatibility mode". :-D At least,
when running a real OS that actually understands modern hardware.
The architecture was called IA-32 starting with the 80386.

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On 24 Apr 2024 at 12:55p, Nightfox pondered and said...

I think it's interesting that it happened that way. I think moving forward while maintaining backward compatibility has been an advantage with x86 processors.

It's been a blessing and a curse. They've been able to
retain compatibility with truly ancient software, and that's
no small feat. But the architecture is atrociously complex
as a result. Most of the time no one has to care, but OS
people do, and there's some seriously annoying vestiges of
bad ideas that you can't get away from (someone explain to
me, please, why I still have to care about the TSS is 64-bit
mode. It's just a table of stack pointers; stuff 'em in
MSRs).

Apple seems to have the opposite strategy, where they have no problem swapping out the processor in their Mac lineup to something entirely different. They've done that several times in the history of the Mac. I've done some software development work on an M1 Mac not too long ago, and one of the frustrations was having to use its x86 emulation
sometimes to do some builds, as there were some 3rd-party software libraries that were still only supporting x86 and didn't support M1 yet.

By my count, the Mac is on its 4th hardware architecture (68k,
PowerPC, x86, and now ARM).

Their observation, and it's not a bad one, is that it doesn't
matter all _that_ much: once you've got decent binary translation
support in place for the transition, very few people are writing
assembly language directly anymore; you can just recompile for a
new ISA and go with that. Of course, issues like you described
are irritating for software developers, most that's an edge case.

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I know I'm just being pedantic, but the 32-bit mode is called x86, not x32. I think the name comes from Intel's early processor, the 8086.

Thou art correct... bit of a brain fart, but can't edit stuff here once its posted.

Spec


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By my count, the Mac is on its 4th hardware architecture (68k,
PowerPC, x86, and now ARM).
Their observation, and it's not a bad one, is that it doesn't
matter all _that_ much: once you've got decent binary translation
support in place for the transition, very few people are writing
assembly language directly anymore; you can just recompile for a
new ISA and go with that. Of course, issues like you described
are irritating for software developers, most that's an edge case.

I've been thinking about this too since I got an ARM Macbook - there's been some hassles (running non-ARM virtual machines), but in the big picture the problems haven't been the worst. And from past transitions we've seen that we get over these changes quickly, when it comes to the long term.

Right now the hassle is running some recent-but-not-current x86 software, but it's been quite a while since most of us were concerned with the switch from PowerPC. Or the switch from 68k before that. Between the emulation provided by Apple, and the march of time, we've seen an architecture change is survivable.

Anyway, even without a switch to a totally different architecture, we still generally end up needing compatibility layers to run very old software on new machines. (for any platform)

I think it's a bit of the same idea that led to the removal of floppy disk drives from Apple computers, before many people were ready to let them go. But now when I look back, I think it's more strange how long mostly-unused floppy disk drives kept being installed in PCs. (used maybe for a driver install, because PCs weren't forced to move on to a better standard, because the floppy drives stuck around.)


Chris/akacastor

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Re: Re: X86S
By: AKAcastor to Tenser on Wed Apr 24 2024 01:58 pm

I think it's a bit of the same idea that led to the removal of floppy disk drives from Apple computers, before many people were ready to let them go. But now when I look back, I think it's more strange how long mostly-unused floppy disk drives kept being installed in PCs. (used maybe for a driver install, because PCs weren't forced to move on to a better standard, because the floppy drives stuck around.)

I'm not a big fan of things being removed before their usefulness has passed. Now that I actually stopped using floppy disks years ago, I'm fine with my PC not having a floppy drive.

Nightfox
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i think this would result in somthing like th old days into cpu pcie cards or so where the 16-32 bit part would run in think.

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tenser wrote to Spectre <=-

That was kind of what the OEMs all wanted, which meant that
the desktop market and low-end servers all went x86_64, and
Itanium was relegated to the high-end, where it only had
marginal market penetration. Eventually, x86_64 took over
there, too (at least by volume), in part thanks to the
hyperscalars paving the way for large-scale x86 deployment
in server environments.

It seems lots of people underestimated the power of lots of cheap Intel
boxes. Central Computers in San Francisco was my idea of an auto-scaling
group - traffic increases on the web site? I could call them and get a
server built in 24 hours. They were 4 blocks away.

The year before we'd been running Sun for both the database and front-end
of a web site using some Netscap web server - the following year the
front-end was all cheap white boxes running Apache on Linux.





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On 25 Apr 2024 at 06:56a, poindexter FORTRAN pondered and said...

tenser wrote to Spectre <=-

That was kind of what the OEMs all wanted, which meant that
the desktop market and low-end servers all went x86_64, and
Itanium was relegated to the high-end, where it only had
marginal market penetration. Eventually, x86_64 took over
there, too (at least by volume), in part thanks to the
hyperscalars paving the way for large-scale x86 deployment
in server environments.

It seems lots of people underestimated the power of lots of cheap Intel boxes. Central Computers in San Francisco was my idea of an auto-scaling group - traffic increases on the web site? I could call them and get a server built in 24 hours. They were 4 blocks away.

The year before we'd been running Sun for both the database and front-end of a web site using some Netscap web server - the following year the front-end was all cheap white boxes running Apache on Linux.

100% this. Google started out going down that road, but
then the need to scale hit them in the pocketbook and they
realized that they could scale _horizontally_ by buying
lots and lots of cheap, shitty computers and putting them
into racks themselves. You didn't _need_ a big Sun Ultra
Enterprise E10k machine with all sorts of redundancies baked
in, and for the pricetag of that one box, you could buy 10x
more in raw compute capacity in cheap PCs. You also didn't
need a super expensive Oracle database to run it all. And
if one of those machines crashes? Oh well, you've got 999
more that'll keep running. Eventually someone will wander
through the data center and reboot the ones that crashed.

Of course, it helped that search is an embarrassingly parallel
problem. And nowadays Google datacenter machines are marvels
of modern engineering that you can't buy on the open market
(but you can buy similar machines from Oxide!).

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I'm not a big fan of things being removed before their usefulness has passed. Now that I actually stopped using floppy disks years ago, I'm
fine with my PC not having a floppy drive.

Hmmm Even though I "like"floppies, older computers - Hey even my "home server"is probably 20 years old already, and "main desktop"is over 12... - It's prpbbaly more than 15 years I don't use a flopp disk. Even USB drives, to be real, I havent used for about 4 years... except when I want to install/reinstall OS on some of those machines and older laptops I have here...
even on those machines I really ddidnt need the floppies anymore...



[ ]
Krull

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Hmmm Even though I "like"floppies, older computers - Hey even my "home server"is probably 20 years old already, and "main desktop"is over 12...
- It's prpbbaly more than 15 years I don't use a flopp disk. Even USB

What kind of machines?

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Re: Re: X86S
By: krull to Nightfox on Wed May 01 2024 07:41 pm

I'm not a big fan of things being removed before their usefulness has
passed. Now that I actually stopped using floppy disks years ago, I'm
fine with my PC not having a floppy drive.

Hmmm Even though I "like"floppies, older computers - Hey even my "home server"is probably 20 years old already, and "main desktop"is over 12... - It's prpbbaly more than 15 years I don't use a flopp disk. Even USB drives, to be real, I havent used for about 4 years... except when I want to install/reinstall OS on some of those machines and older laptops I have here... even on those machines I really ddidnt need the floppies anymore...

Yeah, even if you have an older PC, I wouldn't really expect to use floppy disks if those computers can use newer things.

Nightfox
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Hello krull,

01 May 24 19:41, you wrote to Nightfox:

I'm not a big fan of things being removed before their usefulness
has passed. Now that I actually stopped using floppy disks years
ago, I'm fine with my PC not having a floppy drive.

Hmmm Even though I "like"floppies, older computers - Hey even my
"home server"is probably 20 years old already, and "main desktop"is
over 12... - It's prpbbaly more than 15 years I don't use a flopp
disk. Even USB drives, to be real, I havent used for about 4 years... except when I want to install/reinstall OS on some of those machines
and older laptops I have here... even on those machines I really
ddidnt need the floppies anymore...

i've set up a local tftp for network install/memtest possibility, so if its not a windows machine, i don't have to use usb drives for that purpose :)

Regards,
--
dp

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What kind of machines?

ah let's rephrase to "older PCs"... have an AMD Athlon X2, an FX-8350 (or any number close to that, I just forgot), and some damn old notebooks - a celeron, a AMD E-350... wierd stuff :)

[ ]
krull

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Hmmm Even though I "like"floppies, older computers - Hey even my "home server"is probably 20 years old already, and "main desktop"is over 12...
- It's prpbbaly more than 15 years I don't use a flopp disk. Even USB drives, to be real, I havent used for about 4 years... except when I
want to install/reinstall OS on some of those machines and older
laptops I have here... even on those machines I really ddidnt need the floppies anymore...

floppies are a novity now. having them means your retro! like me!

--mary4 (Victoria Crenshaw) the 286 enthusiast

... Error, no Keyboard - Press F1 to Continue.

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ah let's rephrase to "older PCs"... have an AMD Athlon X2, an FX-8350 (or

I ended up retiring my FX-8xxx it was a great box, but it was prone to overheating, and it drank electrickery like it was going out of fashion :/
Went back to a core2 Quad after that.

Spec


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floppies are a novity now. having them means your retro! like me!

Oh, that's true. I have many, just don't use. LOL
I remember some kind of music netlabel.. "Pionierska", I guess, they used to sell music floppies... :)

[ ]
Krull

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Oh, that's true. I have many, just don't use. LOL
I remember some kind of music netlabel.. "Pionierska", I guess, they
used to sell music floppies... :)

:DDDDDDDDDDDD yay! <3 thats PEAK COOL!!!! <3

--mary4 (Victoria Crenshaw) the 286 enthusiast

... Redundant book title: DOS For Dummies

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