Date: 13 Dec 2002 18:07:56 +1300 From: James Pole <james.pole@paradise.net.nz> To: Charles Swiger <cswiger@mac.com> Cc: freebsd-stable@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: Cyrix CPUs, was: Re: Repeatable crash from nautilus2 Message-ID: <1039756076.12023.5.camel@localhost> In-Reply-To: <004901c2a25c$0c381c50$0301a8c0@prime> References: <20021213021012.61714.qmail@web40303.mail.yahoo.com> <004901c2a25c$0c381c50$0301a8c0@prime>
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On Fri, 2002-12-13 at 16:58, Charles Swiger wrote: > Rhett Monteg Hollander wrote: > [ ... ] > > What Cyrix CPU? And what OS'es? And maybe vice versa? > > I do remember hard issues with WinNT 3.51 and original > > Win'95 when running on Cyrix 5x86\6x86 or NexGen > > Nx586. > > # CPU_BTB_EN enables branch target buffer on Cyrix 5x86 (NOTE 1). > # > # CPU_DIRECT_MAPPED_CACHE sets L1 cache of Cyrix 486DLC CPU in direct > # mapped mode. Default is 2-way set associative mode. > # > # CPU_CYRIX_NO_LOCK enables weak locking for the entire address space > # of Cyrix 6x86 and 6x86MX CPUs by setting the NO_LOCK bit of CCR1. > # Otherwise, the NO_LOCK bit of CCR1 is cleared. (NOTE 3) > [ ... ] > # NOTE 1: The options, CPU_BTB_EN, CPU_LOOP_EN, CPU_IORT, > # CPU_LOOP_EN and CPU_RSTK_EN should not be used because of CPU bugs. > # These options may crash your system. > # > # NOTE 2: If CYRIX_CACHE_REALLY_WORKS is not set, CPU cache is enabled > # in write-through mode when revision < 2.7. If revision of Cyrix > # 6x86 >= 2.7, CPU cache is always enabled in write-back mode. > # > # NOTE 3: This option may cause failures for software that requires > # locked cycles in order to operate correctly. > > Yum. Sounds tasty. Indeed it does. Intel and AMD, despite having produced processors for many years, still havn't achieved the "fame" that Cyrix has achieved in the LINT file. I think the fact Cyrix isn't very popular these days, compared to Intel/AMD processors says a lot about the quality of their processors back in the Pentium/586 days. Nowdays people use Intel/AMD processors and to date I havn't come across any serious problems with those processors. I'm not saying they don't have problems, but Intel/AMD are often willing to replace CPUs with bugs (such as that floating point pug that occured in the Intel Pentium in the mid-1990's) and many of the bugs are so simple they are solved by a simple software workaround (eg Intel's F00F bug -- almost every OS including FreeBSD includes the workaround). - James To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-stable" in the body of the message
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