[rescue] SMP on intel wasteful?

[Dave McGuire]

On June 24, Gary Nichols wrote:
> Dude, why don't you just drive down to Dave's house and pee all over his 
> equipment while you're at it?  *DAMN*
> :-)
> 
> (Grabs coke, prepares for enevitable PC->RISC flamewar)

  Nope, not gonna happen this time.  These days I have bigger fish to
fry than "i just wuv my pee cee" kiddiez.

  This brings up an important (non-flamewar) point, however.  The
current crop of modern microprocessors can considered to be
"post-RISC", as processor architecture continues to evolve.  Indeed,
the Alpha is considered by many to be a RISC architecture...but have
you looked at the size of that instruction set?  There's nothing
"R"educed about it.

  Even the x86 architecure, while miraculously maintaining instruction
set compatibility with previous implementations in spite of the fact
that it was never designed to be scalable, incorporates many of the
features that make RISC RISC, or that make post-RISC post-RISC.  The
PPro for example (arguably Intel's only half-decent implementation of
the x86 architecture) decomposes x86 instructions into "uops"
(micro-operations) and then executes them in a processor core that
very much resembles what we commonly refer to as RISC.

  This, however, doesn't change the fact that the overall x86 processor
architecture is repulsive. ;)

         -Dave

-- 
Dave McGuire                  "Needing a calculator indicates that
St. Petersburg, FL              your .emacs file is incomplete." -Joshua Boyd