[rescue] SMP on intel wasteful?

[Joshua D Boyd]

On Mon, Jun 24, 2002 at 02:01:46PM -0400, Dave McGuire wrote:

>   But I'll throw you a bone, since I'm such a nice guy...first, take a
> look at IDE/ATA disks.  Don't make the argument that "but I can put
> SCSI on a PeeCee!" because then your "but it's cheaper!" argument gets
> blown even further out of the water than it already is.  Then look at
> ROM monitor ("BIOS" for you PeeCee guys) support.  Four partitions?
> No diag capabilities?  No analog of "environment variable" support to
> pass defaults to the booting OS?  Come ON, the VAX had that in 1978.
> Then take a look at segmented addressing, then tiny caches.  If you're
> still hungry for more, take a look at the number of available
> registers.  How well does that mesh with modern compiler technology?
> And if you're STILL not convinced, go try to actually *program* an
> x86-architecture processor.  When you're ready to commit suicide, drop
> me an email and I'll hook you up with a decent price on a real
> computer.

For the sake of fairness and acuracy, IDE will deal with more
partitians, but most BIOSs don't like more.

Also, I believe that some PCs, like the first generation SGI PCs, had
environment variables and limited diag capabilities.  For a growing
number of motherboards, this is something that can be flashed into the
board. 

But that 4 general purpose register bit (which aren't even truly
general purpose) pisses me off.
 
-- 
Joshua D. Boyd