8086 - and 40 years later, another 8086(K)

Comments

• nicstt Posts: 11,715

  June 2018

  Peter Wade said:

  Someone said that the 8086 was a milestone. I suppose it is, but I always thought of it as a millstone  I started programming professionally in assembler using the Z-80 which I still think is a nice design. Then I was presented with the 8086. OK we're going from 16 bit addresses to .... 20 bit? And there are these segment registers, we've got addresses split into a segment and an offset, we have to reload a segement register to go beyond 64k? What is this mess???

  At home I went from 8 bit micros to an Amiga with the 68000 and a simple 32 bit linear address space. And don't start me on how the Amiga was much better that the PCs of the time. I still wonder what sort of computers we might have now if the effort that went into devloping the modern PC had gone into devloping the Amiga.

  I started at home with 8 bit micros. I had a TRS-80, Spectrum, Atari 400 (my favourite 8 bit machine), C64. Then I went to the Amiga, then I admitted defeat and went to a Windows 95 PC. PCs have advanced enough to good machines now, but at the time I thought the move from Amiga to PC was a step backwards.

  +1

  I still think it was a step backwards.

  I wonder if what was done on the 68000 processors would have made them vulnerable to all the issues that have come to light these last months?
• nicstt Posts: 11,715

  June 2018

  Kitsumo said:

  nonesuch00 said:

  Apple moving to another CPU rather than Intel's will be a mistake with computer graphics advancing so much faster on intel and AMD chips Unless it switches to AMD CPUs. 

  The only thing about that is Apple's market capitalization is more than Intel, Nvidia and AMD combined. Even after their share buybacks, Apple probably has more spare cash sitting around than Intel is worth as a company. One thing silicon valley has showed us is that the company with the money gets whatever they want. If Apple can't develop better technology or hire talent from their competitors, they can just buy the whole company. Microsoft did it plenty of times. But I think producing their own CPUs is just to maintain quality control over their products and avoid exploits like the one that happened a few months ago to Intel and AMD.

  I only wish they would open their own DRAM plant and stop buying up all the memory on the market, raising prices for the rest of us.

   

  Yeh, shippinjg 5-10k machines without the support (training and infrastructure in place) to repair them is all about quality control.
• Kitsumo Posts: 1,222

  June 2018 edited June 2018

  nicstt said:

  Kitsumo said:

  nonesuch00 said:

  Apple moving to another CPU rather than Intel's will be a mistake with computer graphics advancing so much faster on intel and AMD chips Unless it switches to AMD CPUs. 

  The only thing about that is Apple's market capitalization is more than Intel, Nvidia and AMD combined. Even after their share buybacks, Apple probably has more spare cash sitting around than Intel is worth as a company. One thing silicon valley has showed us is that the company with the money gets whatever they want. If Apple can't develop better technology or hire talent from their competitors, they can just buy the whole company. Microsoft did it plenty of times. But I think producing their own CPUs is just to maintain quality control over their products and avoid exploits like the one that happened a few months ago to Intel and AMD.

  I only wish they would open their own DRAM plant and stop buying up all the memory on the market, raising prices for the rest of us.

   

  Yeh, shippinjg 5-10k machines without the support (training and infrastructure in place) to repair them is all about quality control.

  If Apple had that attitude we'd still be using flip phones and Blackberries. New products have to come from somewhere.

  Edit: I know they didn't invent the smartphone, they just made one that people actually wanted to buy.

   

   

  Post edited by Kitsumo on June 2018