From owner-freebsd-questions  Thu Apr 19  8:18:10 2001
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From: "Jeremiah Gowdy" <jgowdy@home.com>
To: "Vincent Poy" <vince@oahu.WURLDLINK.NET>,
	"Charles Burns" <burnscharlesn@hotmail.com>
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Subject: Re: the AMD factor in FreeBSD
Date: Thu, 19 Apr 2001 08:18:10 -0700
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> > Note that the AMD and Intel chips aren't slower because of incompetence.
> > They need to remain backwards-compatible with the 8086 instruction set
and
> > some of its methods of doing things. The 8086 processor sucks. It's
> > architecture and design suck. They were never meant for general purpose
> > computing--more for operating dishwashers and the like. The fact that
they
> > have advanced so far is a testament to the ingenuity of humanity--and to
the
> > stubbornness.
> > Blame IBM. ;-)
>
> Hehe...  I thought the AMD/Intel were both CISC while the PowerPC
> is RISC created by IBM/Motorola/Apple.  I guess until the 486, the x86
> architecture was no match for workstations.

All Intel and AMD x86 cpus today are RISC processors.  They implement their
own hidden custom RISC architecture internally.  The x86 CISC instructions
are translated into fixed length RISC instructions before they are
processed.


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