From owner-freebsd-questions Thu Apr 19 22:46: 8 2001 Delivered-To: freebsd-questions@freebsd.org Received: from oahu.WURLDLINK.NET (oahu.WURLDLINK.NET [216.235.52.1]) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id 0841637B422 for ; Thu, 19 Apr 2001 22:45:51 -0700 (PDT) (envelope-from vince@oahu.WURLDLINK.NET) Received: from localhost (vince@localhost) by oahu.WURLDLINK.NET (8.9.3/8.9.3) with ESMTP id TAA08969; Thu, 19 Apr 2001 19:45:27 -1000 (HST) (envelope-from vince@oahu.WURLDLINK.NET) Date: Thu, 19 Apr 2001 19:45:27 -1000 (HST) From: Vincent Poy To: Linh Pham Cc: Jeremiah Gowdy , Charles Burns , , , , Subject: Re: the AMD factor in FreeBSD In-Reply-To: Message-ID: MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII Sender: owner-freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.ORG Precedence: bulk X-Loop: FreeBSD.ORG On Thu, 19 Apr 2001, Linh Pham wrote: > On 2001-04-19, Vincent Poy scribbled: > > # Somehow I thought the Intel and AMD x86 CPUs were CISC and had a > # portion that was RISC. > > AMD uses their RISC86 engine to turn crummy x86 instructions into > RISC-like instructions to crunch them more efficiently as it can. The > Pentium III processors do something like that since the P6 core, but the > original P6 core sucked at 16-bit code... so Intel had to reduce the > optimizations in the Out-of-Order engine to increase 16-bit performance > in the Pentium II. Interesting. I guess I never read about how AMD did it... I just remember reading a comparison of the Pentium versus the PowerPC 603 I think and it somehow gave the indication that Intel CPU's were CISC with RISC and the PowerPC was 100% RISC. > In reality... the x86 processors and, what people tend to call, RISC > processors now are really post-RISC. Trying to expand IPC and increase > Mhz :) Intel went the opposite with the P4. True but speaking about AMD, PIII and the likes, where does the Xeon fit in? Cheers, Vince - vince@WURLDLINK.NET - Vice President ________ __ ____ Unix Networking Operations - FreeBSD-Real Unix for Free / / / / | / |[__ ] WurldLink Corporation / / / / | / | __] ] San Francisco - Honolulu - Hong Kong / / / / / |/ / | __] ] HongKong Stars/Gravis UltraSound Mailing Lists Admin /_/_/_/_/|___/|_|[____] Almighty1@IRC - oahu.DAL.NET Hawaii's DALnet IRC Network Server Admin To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-questions" in the body of the message