Date: Tue, 19 May 1998 23:57:14 +0200 (MET DST) From: Wilko Bulte <wilko@yedi.iaf.nl> To: freebsd-hackers@FreeBSD.ORG Cc: freebsd-hackers@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: talk (fwd) Message-ID: <199805192157.XAA04150@yedi.iaf.nl> In-Reply-To: <199805191808.UAA17299@dorifer.heim3.tu-clausthal.de> from Oliver Fromme at "May 19, 98 08:08:49 pm"
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As Oliver Fromme wrote... > In list.freebsd-hackers Mike wrote: > > [...] > > I've always heard (I have no motorola experience, yet) that motorola asm > > blows x86 away when it comes to efficiency. A friend I have develops for > > Be and he's always ranting about it. :) > > He's right. The x86 has 4 general-purpose registers, each of > them 16 bits (they were extended to 32 bits in the 80386) and > 4 address registers of the same size. And there are certain > restrictions on their usage, e.g. you can only use the CX > register as counter in the "loop" instruction etc. > > On the other hand, the Motorola 68k has 8 general-purpose > registers of 32 bits and 8 address registers (also 32 bits). > There is no restriction on their use, except that the 8th > address regsiter is the default stack pointer. > > I programmed on both architectures in assembler, and I have to > say that the 68k is definitely easier to program, and the > higher number of registers allows for efficient programming. > > Maybe it was the biggest mistake ever made in computer history > when IBM selected the 8088 for their first PC back in 1979. > (Or was it 1978? Don't know, I probably couldn't even spell > the word "Computer" correctly back then.) If they used the > 68000 -- which was already available at that time -- we would > have less problems today, I guess. An attractive (to me ;-) explanation is that IBM did not want to use the 68K because it was a threat (performance wise) to their high profit machine range. Urban legend or not, it sure sounds OK ;-) _ ______________________________________________________________________ | / o / / _ Bulte email: wilko @ yedi.iaf.nl |/|/ / / /( (_) Arnhem, The Netherlands WWW: http://www.tcja.nl ______________________________________________ Powered by FreeBSD __________ To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-hackers" in the body of the message
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