<story><title>x86: Approaching 40 and still going strong</title><url>https://newsroom.intel.com/editorials/x86-approaching-40-still-going-strong/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>delsarto</author><text>Intel&amp;#x2F;x86 seems to have missed pretty much every major trend but somehow manages to keep up.&lt;p&gt;At the time, Intel seemed to have pinned the 64-bit future on Itanium.  Which, on paper, is a much better architecture.  Of course instruction parallelism should be in the hands of the compiler -- it has so much richer information from the source-code so it can do a better job.  The MMU design was very clever (self-mapped linear page tables, protection keys, TLB sharing, etc).  Lots of cache, minimal core.  Exposing register rotation and really interesting tracing tools.  But AMD released x86&amp;#x2F;64, Intel had to copy it, and the death warrant on Itanium was signed so we never got to really explore those cool features.  Just now we&amp;#x27;re getting things like more levels of page-tables and protection-key type things on x86.&lt;p&gt;Intel missed virtualisation not only in x86 (understandable given legacy) but on Itanium too, where arguably they should have thought about it during green-field development (it was closer but still had a few instructions that didn&amp;#x27;t trap properly for a hypervisor to work).  The first versions of vmware -- doing binary translation of x86 code the fly, was really quite amazing at the time.  Virtualisation happened despite x86, not in any way because of it.  And you can pretty much trace the entire &amp;quot;cloud&amp;quot; back to that.  VMX eventually got bolted on.&lt;p&gt;UEFI is ... interesting.  It&amp;#x27;s better than a BIOS, but would anyone hold that up as a paragon of innovation?&lt;p&gt;I&amp;#x27;m not so familiar with the SIMD bits of the chips, but I wouldn&amp;#x27;t be surprised if there&amp;#x27;s similar stories in that area of development.&lt;p&gt;Low power seems lost to ARM and friends.  Now, with the &amp;quot;cloud&amp;quot;, low power is as much a problem in the data centre as your phone.  So it will be interesting to see how that plays out (and it&amp;#x27;s starting to).&lt;p&gt;x86&amp;#x27;s persistence is certainly remarkable, that&amp;#x27;s for sure</text></comment>
<story><title>x86: Approaching 40 and still going strong</title><url>https://newsroom.intel.com/editorials/x86-approaching-40-still-going-strong/</url></story><parent_chain></parent_chain><comment><author>ohazi</author><text>Wow, what the fuck happened with their patent applications in 2014?&lt;p&gt;It&amp;#x27;s difficult to take this threatening language seriously when it&amp;#x27;s exceedingly obvious that Intel is very suddenly (and very rightfully) terrified of losing their monopoly position. It&amp;#x27;s easier than ever to recompile and switch to ARM, and people are tired of paying the Intel tax.&lt;p&gt;They should have seen this coming well before Otellini retired. Lawsuits aren&amp;#x27;t going to save them here, and Rodgers comes out looking like an asshole for trying.</text></comment>