Fascinating Look at CPU History, and ripping on P4

[swaaye]

Fascinating Look at CPU Architectures

http://www.emulators.com/docs/pentium_1.htm

I was bored and was doing some gooling for comparisons between 68040 and Pentium when I found this fascinating and seriously in-depth read on CPU generations and their advancements (or degenerations lol). Anyway let me know what you guys think. I thought that explanations of limitations of P6 was pretty fascinating....and I got kicks out of him ripping P4 a new one.

 

[Simon F]

From the linked article:

Processor Basics - the various generations of processors over the past 20 years
Generation 1 - 8086 and 68000

If it doesn't go back at least to the 6800, 6805 and Z80 then it's not interesting

 

[Druga Runda]

that was a good read, pity that the guy never did K8 analysis

 

[Guden Oden]

Am I wrong, or isn't this article actually very old? I know there was an emulators.com article bashing the P4 back in the bad old willamette days (partly because barrel shifts were terribly slow on that chip and apparantly that's an important op for emulation work - possibly for screen scrolling? Endian conversion? Not sure.)

Anyway, Intel fixed the core and sped up shifts in the northwood. I know that mame flies on my current box, at least all games except the ones using 3D graphics.

 

[John Reynolds]

The thought occurred to me this morning in the shower to e-mail Loyd Case at Extremetech and suggest the idea for an article on the fracturing of the CPU's role. It just hit me after reading how an Israeli startup is working on a new chip dedicated to A.I., and in a market that sees discrete parts for graphics, sound (though this one is clearly waning to some degree), physics (possibly), and now A.I. (possibly), the central processing unit that has so long served so many roles for so long seems to be under attack a bit these days.

 

[Accord1999]

Am I wrong, or isn't this article actually very old? I know there was an emulators.com article bashing the P4 back in the bad old willamette days (partly because barrel shifts were terribly slow on that chip and apparantly that's an important op for emulation work - possibly for screen scrolling? Endian conversion? Not sure.)

Anyway, Intel fixed the core and sped up shifts in the northwood. I know that mame flies on my current box, at least all games except the ones using 3D graphics.

Yeah, the article is very old. In fact the author made 3 additional articles, the last one when the P4 took the performance lead.

http://www.emulators.com/docs/pentium_4.htm

 

[swaaye]

Yeah it's old. And there are several parts to it (look at the bottom for a link). The P4 does sorta take off towards the end. He also has some interesting things to say about Athlon XP being a bit too talked up and actually being VERY similar to Thunderbird other than SSE.

Although it's a bit old I don't think the info is at all useless. He's obviously a skilled programmer and has a lot of interesting stuff to say about each chip out there, other than the latest stuff.

 

[pcchen]

Sometimes the software people is not the best one to comment on CPU core designs. Software people know what's the most useful features to be made, but they (or actually, we) don't really know how these features are easy or hard to implement. So it's probably best to hear stories from both sides to get a better picture.

 

[Druga Runda]

but it is still a great read, and I wish the guy would make two more comparisons, one with Hammer vs P4 Northwood vs Prescott and now Dual Core matchup between AMD and Intel... the articles were easy to read and were the comparisons pretty complete for me from not very technical background