[rescue] sparc10 cpu - what to do.

[Jonathan Patschke]

On Sun, 18 Dec 2016, Phil Stracchino wrote:

>> Itanium was touted as the real any only way forward by Intel until AMD
>> extended the i386 instruction ABI to 64 bits.  Rather regrettable that AMD
>> did that, as IA64 threw away a lot of the things that make i386 so
>> problematic.
>
> The thing is, amd64 solved 90% of the real-world problems ia64 did, with
> maybe 20% of the added complexity.  And Intel never did really leverage
> the remaining 10% effectively anyway.

Pretty-much exactly that.

If you're trying to go to the moon, you'd rather take a rocket than an
outhouse strapped down with propellant, but Intel ensured this robust
economy of industry-standard known-quantity outhouses, and AMD just
happened to have a lot of propellant in their fabs.  And here we are.

In the fifteen or years since, though, amd64 (and its more common Intel
spin) has become a very nice ABI, if you can stay in long mode.  EFI,
despite being not as nice as OpenBoot and despite dependent upon the
bletcherous FAT filesystem, is a hundred times better than that BIOS
thing.

With most of the interior buses on a modern PC all being PCIe wearing
different funny hats, differential signals all over the place,
firmware-level device-and-config trees, IOMMUs on most CPUs, and a bootup
model that is no-longer "blit this block to 0x7c00 and run it," the design
of the disposable desktop is nearly as elegant as anything the
minicomputer makers gave us 30 years ago.

-- 
Jonathan Patschke
Austin, TX
USA