What Influenced x86 ISA Evolution in Last 40+ Years

cpu-influence-evolution So here’s the picture. It’s quite a high-level view, mostly focused on early days. I am trying to formulate an extended answer on this question: “Why does Intel IA-32 instruction encoding is so damn complex?”The short answer is: “It’s evolution, not design”. A long answer is, well, longer.

Three factors played their roles:

  1. Backwards compatibility.
  2. Previous projects. 8086 is different in many ways from 8080, 8008, 4004. But there were the same people behind them all.
  3. Competition, especially in early ages, but also throughout the XX and XXI centuries.

Written by Grigory Rechistov in Uncategorized on 07.08.2015. Tags: 4004, 8008, 8086, evolution, history, ia-32, x86,


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