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A History of PowerPC

Posted by Hemos on from the looking-into-the-past dept.

A reader writes: "There's a article about chipmaking at IBM up at DeveloperWorks. While IBM-centric, it talks a lot about the PowerPC, but really dwells on the common ancestory of IBM 801" Interesting article, especially for people interested in chips and chip design.

1 of 193 comments (clear)

  1. Don't ignore integer sizes! by Dog135 · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Expanding the data to 64 bits has no effect on existing code, whereas the big-endian case will have to change all the pointer values

    So, you're reading in an array of integers, which are now 64 bit vs 32 bit and no code change is needed?

    Programs NEED to know the size of the data they're working with. Simply pulling data from an address without caring for it's size is a recipee for disaster!

    --
    "That's so plausible, I can't believe it!" - Leela