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On 10/30/2015 12:05 AM, Jim Henderson wrote:
> Always glad to be of service.:)
:-)
--
Regards
Stephen
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> Yeah, I haven't done a lot with x86 assembly, but with 40 years of
> backwards-compatibility, it's pretty complicated. And ugly to start
> with, it seems! (Well, it was originally designed for low-cost pocket
> calculators, not supercomputers!)
You could probably explain the vast majority of ARM assembler in a
single newsgroup post. The syntax is very simple, and the mnemonics are
mostly obvious or very easy to remember. You're free to use any register
for source or either of the destinations, and all registers are the same
bit-width.
>> However you
>> need a massive chunk of experience and knowledge to even *install* the
>> Android SDK, let alone start writing a new app.
>
> Also agree!
Someone needs to write a wrapper to go on top of the Android SDK that is
a) easy to install and b) uses an easy language that allows you to just
start writing commands to draw stuff without tons of boiler-plate code.
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On 30/10/2015 08:48 AM, scott wrote:
>> Yeah, I haven't done a lot with x86 assembly, but with 40 years of
>> backwards-compatibility, it's pretty complicated. And ugly to start
>> with, it seems! (Well, it was originally designed for low-cost pocket
>> calculators, not supercomputers!)
>
> You could probably explain the vast majority of ARM assembler in a
> single newsgroup post. The syntax is very simple, and the mnemonics are
> mostly obvious or very easy to remember. You're free to use any register
> for source or either of the destinations, and all registers are the same
> bit-width.
The M68k has 8 "data registers" and 8 "address registers", which you can
freely use for any purpose (although the address registers are somewhat
optimised for holding addresses).
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?!?!
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...
> Someone needs to write a wrapper to go on top of the Android SDK that is
> a) easy to install and b) uses an easy language that allows you to just
> start writing commands to draw stuff without tons of boiler-plate code.
Meh. Just use Haskell. ;-)
(Seriously, people occasionally ask about cross-compiling to ARM. I
can't think of any other reason why somebody would do that. Apparently
it even *works*, vaguely...)
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> 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.
> 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.
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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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>>> 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?
The former I would guess, as even the first versions used in the Acorn
desktop machines were very low power when they probably didn't have any
budget, time or real incentive to reduce it. I'm sure since then though
there has been huge pressure and R&D expenditure to reduce it further.
This list is quite interesting:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transistor_count
At each point in time the ARM CPU seems to have about 10x fewer
transistors than its x86 equivalent. As a very rough I guess I'd say
that means it used 10x less power. In thermal terms that is probably
enough to make the difference between needing a heatsink and fan and
working with just the bare chip.
What's also interesting is that the ARM2 had 25k transistors, yet
further down the page it claims 21k transistors are needed for a 32-bit
multiplier. Figure that one out. I think the answer is that on the ARM2
the MUL instruction was the only one (apart from the load/store multiple
register instruction) that took more than one clock cycle. As such it
probably used a much smaller circuit to do it in chunks.
It also interesting to note that even on the earliest cores you could do
an arbitrary bit-shift for free with every instruction on one of the
source registers. So if you wanted to multiply by 320 (commonly needed
in graphics algorithms of the day) you could do it with a single move
and add instruction:
result = y << 8
result = result + y << 6
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On Mon, 02 Nov 2015 13:01:37 +0000, Orchid Win7 v1 wrote:
> But hey, Intel invented the Itanium to get away from all that... and
> nobody bought it.
Heh, yeah, it turns out that people want to be able to use the software
they've purchased.
Jim
--
"I learned long ago, never to wrestle with a pig. You get dirty, and
besides, the pig likes it." - George Bernard Shaw
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On 02/11/2015 05:16 PM, Jim Henderson wrote:
> On Mon, 02 Nov 2015 13:01:37 +0000, Orchid Win7 v1 wrote:
>
>> But hey, Intel invented the Itanium to get away from all that... and
>> nobody bought it.
>
> Heh, yeah, it turns out that people want to be able to use the software
> they've purchased.
But all you need to do is run the source code through the other compiler...
...oh, wait. Somebody in marketing just realised we can charge the
customer money to buy the software again. *sigh*
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On Mon, 02 Nov 2015 18:09:37 +0000, Orchid Win7 v1 wrote:
> On 02/11/2015 05:16 PM, Jim Henderson wrote:
>> On Mon, 02 Nov 2015 13:01:37 +0000, Orchid Win7 v1 wrote:
>>
>>> But hey, Intel invented the Itanium to get away from all that... and
>>> nobody bought it.
>>
>> Heh, yeah, it turns out that people want to be able to use the software
>> they've purchased.
>
> But all you need to do is run the source code through the other
> compiler...
>
> ...oh, wait. Somebody in marketing just realised we can charge the
> customer money to buy the software again. *sigh*
Like most software companies do.
And most software that people purchase doesn't come with source code.
Jim
--
"I learned long ago, never to wrestle with a pig. You get dirty, and
besides, the pig likes it." - George Bernard Shaw
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•On Tue, 27 Oct 2015 00:43:59 +0200, Orchid Win7 v1 <voi### [at] dev nu
ll> wrote:
> On 26/10/2015 09:06 PM, Le_Forgeron wrote:
>> Only 2 colours per 8x8 pixels was the main drawback of the display.
>
> Oh yeah... I forgot about that! One time I wrote a program to draw
> randomly positioned circles in random colours. After a few minutes of
> drawing, most of the pixels were in the "on" state, but there were wei
rd
> squares of colour that changed every time a new circle was started.
>
> I also remember saving several test patterns to tape, and eventually
> discovering which colour provoked which tone from the speaker... Jesus
,
> I was bored as a child!
>
> I've always wanted to know... why is the framebuffer arranged so
> weirdly? Like, as you load a picture file, rather than filling from to
p
> to bottom, it seems to fill every Nth line...
I remember
•Upgrading my 16K to a 48K
•Doing string-art type designs just to see the interesting desig
ns that
aliasing resulted in.
•Designing my own fonts.
•Printing a school project on thermal paper. Bad idea.
•Making a 3d wireframe modeler that could only take 100 edges. T
he
wireframe "render" could then further be coloured and textured with my
custom paint program. Since I didn't have a joystick, I controlled the
brush with 2 different systems: Angular (L & R arrows altered the angle
of
movement) an Normal.
•Dumping my Speccy in the bin because it died and you couldn't g
et parts
anymore.
Now if I could just find the time to learn proper programming and contin
ue
the 3d project on my pc.
--
-Nekar Xenos-
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