🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <33F150F1.6392DF1C@sprynet.com>,
"Jeremias A. Sauceda" <jsauceda@sprynet.com> wrote:
>The 8088 has 8 general purpose registers.
>The 80386 has 8 general purpose registers.
>The Pentium has 8 general purpose registers.

Those 8 registers are hardly general-purpose.  One of them is already
reserved as the stack pointer.  Multiplications must be AX times
something else --- you cannot multiply BX by CX.  Data for the I/O
ports must be in AX, and the I/O port numbers must be hardcoded or in
DX.  Some other instructions, such as the LOOP instruction using only
CX as the counter, are less critical (you can write a loop without
LOOP), but they further demonstrate the 70's mindset.  No, you do not
have 8 general-purpose registers.  You have not only 8 registers, but
also 8 special-purpose registers.

The 680x0 has 8 data registers and 8 address registers.  The data
registers are nearly perfectly general-purpose, as you can multiply
anyone by anyone, and the loop instruction accepts anyone as a counter;
the only shortcoming is that they cannot be used as addresses.
Addresses must be stored in the 8 address registers, which can be added
to, subtracted from, and of which one is reserved as the stack pointer.
Overall, 8 equivocal data registers plus 8 equivocal address registers
beat 8 special-purpose registers.

The modern x86 processors compensate for this by having a longer
instruction queue, a large code cache, and a large data cache.  Fewer
registers means more memory accesses because you have to swap among
memory and registers, but if memory means cache then you are still
fine.  This, in addition to the internal RISC, is why the Pentium is
still fast enough despite all the stupidity.

>I think users are simply not educated, this is the root of all these
>bloated apps and processors.

Indeed.  Free market and competition are designed to encourage good
products, but this assumes that the customers can tell the good from
the bad.  Since they cannot, whoever having the fancier advertisements
and GUIs wins.

>Some one asked me how much it would cost to upgrade their Pentium 75 to
>a Pentium 166 or higher.  When I asked why the answer was "I want to use
>the latest version of Word".  This persion does nothing but word
>processing.  What difference would Pentium 75/8MB/WinFWGrps/MS Works
>make over Pentium 166/32MB/w95/Word?

Trend worship, in addition to the worship of fancy advertisements and
GUIs.

>When all these companies and magazines fill everyone's head with garbage
>people will buy any crap, ultimately there is little progress.

There is much progress, but in the profit of these vendors.  From the
business point of view, which is probably the only concern of the
general public (including the under-educated customers) as evident in
the idiom "money talks", these companies are making unprecedented
success.

-- 
Albert Y.C. Lai   trebla@vex.net   http://www.vex.net/~trebla/