On 02/11/2015 08:25 AM, scott wrote:
>> x86 has... what... FOUR main registers? And the FPU register stack...
>> which is also the MMX registers... but then a separate set of XMM
>> registers added for the SSE instruction set?... but then SSE2 made them
>> wider, so there's XMMX... WHAT THE HELL IS GOING ON?!?!
>
> Backwards compatibility is what's going on.

The root of all evil, right there.

But hey, Intel invented the Itanium to get away from all that... and 
nobody bought it.

>> I gather ARM is quite a popular architecture. I don't know whether
>> that's because there's readily available chips and IP-cores, because
>> it's low-power, or because it's really easy to program...
>
> Low power.

Why is that? It is because there's something particular about this 
instruction set which makes it especially suitable for low power? Or is 
it merely that a lot of people have spent R&D on making low-power 
implementations of it?

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