Can intel make a cpu with 1 legacy core and rest subset of x86 isa?

[VirtualLarry]

I believe at some point CPUs will be totally abstracted to the same level that GPUs are now - instead of having to rewrite the operating system for a new architecture, you just install a new "OpenCPUL" driver and away you go.

You mean like Java and Android?

 

[hans007]

You mean like Java and Android?

transmeta basically did this too, and well they are gone now.


i am not some cpu expert, but from what i've read the x86 decode logic on an intel chip hasnt exactly grown much since the first chips that translated to internal risc like operations. (which i think was the p6).

so basically the number of transistors dedicated to translating from x86 has remained the same while the rest of the chip has gotten bigger (so the piece of the die dedicated to it is smaller and smaller with each node size decrease).

that said, intel doesn't want to change instruction sets. intel has the best fabs, and the fastest cpus bar none. if they say switched the decoder out to say decode arm into say intel micro ops, they would be faster obviously (lets say this was possible).

but the whol epoint of staying on x86 is that they dont have as much competition and they have the advantage of backwards compatibility. without that they are just another builder of cpus, albiet a very good one. same with amd.

neither amd or intel want to compete with broadcom, qualcom, samsung, TI etc, on top of each other as for "good enough" purposes they will lose.

that said, the reason an intel chip uses so muhc more power than an arm one is not because of the ISA entirely. its because the x86 ISA has so much more functionality. ARM chips are not even 64-bit, they dont have things like mmx / SSE /2/3 super fast floating point devices etc. if ARM cpus were so fast they'd be in servers, and even a 3 year old atom is probably faster than a 3 year old atom.

think about it, if you take a 1GHz athlon XP you probably are still faster than an ARM core right now on integer and fpu compute type things ( i cant substantiate my claims, but i'd think this is probably true). fab a 1ghz athlon XP on the latest 40nm tsmc process with all the power saving measures and clock gating and who knows how efficient it would be.

 

[evilspoons]

You mean like Java and Android?

Yep, even though Java's not actually an operating system. 😛

Microsoft's .NET is like this too. It seems to me they may be making .NET a bit more portable in the future, what with this ARM Windows 8 thing coming up!

These systems still need a lot of lower-level code written for the interpreter though. I'm thinking more along the lines of in 10 years you'll literally be able to install a CPU driver for the ONE version of Windows and it will just drop onto any architecture. (All you'd need is a bootloader of some sort to get to the point where you can install the CPU driver.)

 

[Voo]

Yep, even though Java's not actually an operating system. 😛

Well but there are already CPUs that can execute Java bytecode natively 😉

And MS had a research project about a OS written in .NET iirc - still needs some native code obviously but was quite interesting. Now if my memory just weren't that fuzzy.

 

[nyker96]

Welcome to the forums richardffw! :thumbsup:


But you got to trust me when I tell you that Intel would just as soon sell you an Abacus as they would a 990X if they thought you'd be willing to buy that Abacus for $999 and Intel's accountants figured they'd net >50% gross margins from venturing into the Abacus market.

Oh yeah I'm willing to pay $999 for an Abacus as long as it's got an "genuine Intel" sticker on it ;]

 

[drizek]

I heard newegg was selling some abacuses that had Genuine Intel stickers on them but were actually fakes.

Those Chinese will copy anything...

 

[Ben90]

..

 

[pruitts]

I agree to Preferlinux, very well explain..









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