Despite Aging Design, x86 Still in Charge

An anonymous reader writes "The x86 chip architecture is still kicking, almost 30 years after it was first introduced. A News.com article looks into the reasons why we're not likely to see it phased out any time soon, and the history of a well-known instruction set architecture. 'Every time [there is a dramatic new requirement or change in the marketplace], whether it's the invention of the browser or low-cost network computers that were supposed to make PCs go away, the engineers behind x86 find a way to make it adapt to the situation. Is that a problem? Critics say x86 is saddled with the burden of supporting outdated features and software, and that improvements in energy efficiency and software development have been sacrificed to its legacy. And a comedian would say it all depends on what you think about disco.'"

Comments

It's hairy to emulate, too

[kabdib]

Things would be a lot easier if the darned thing wasn't so bloody complex to emulate. I mean if we were "stuck" with (say) an ARM or even a 68K we'd be able to use virtual machines to dig ourselves out of a similar architectural hole (though with an ARM we'd be unlikely to want to).

The x86 has so many modes of operation (SMM, real/protected, lots of choices for vectorizing instructions, 16/32/64 bit modes) and special cases that it's a pretty big project to get emulation working correctly (much less fast). You're pretty much stuck with a 10x reduction clock-for-clock on a host. Making an emulated environment secure is hard, too; you don't necessarily need specialized hardware here (e.g., specialized MMU mapping modes), but it helps.

And now, with transistor speeds bottoming-out, they want to go multicore and make *more* of the things, which is exactly the opposite direction that I want to go in... :-)

60% of transistors used for legacy modes?

[trigeek]

"There's no reason whatsoever why the Intel architecture remains so complex," said XenSource Chief Technology Officer Simon Crosby. "There's no reason why they couldn't ditch 60 percent of the transistors on the chip, most of which are for legacy modes."

Who is this guy and what is he smoking? Over half of a modern processor is cache. The instruction decoding and address decoding are a small fraction of the remainder. Where does he get the 60% from?

Re:English is 700 years old

[KowShak]

One of the reasons that x86 is able to perform as well as it does is its code density, that is a measure of how small a number of instructions (and the memory you need to store them) is compared to the work they can do.

RISC architectures don't give very good code density, so ARM have their ARM Thumb compressed instruction set, thats the way the embedded processors acheive good power efficiency, by cutting down the amount of memory traffic that instruction requests generate.

You can think of x86 as a way to compress the storage needed to contain the equivilent RISC instructions needed to perform the same work, that means that you make better use of available memory bandwidth and caches etc, your memory is vastly slower than the processor so you've got to make use of its bandwidth efficiently.