the x86 instruction proprietary extensions: a waste of time, money and energy

"After all, the poor souls that have to program the insanely complex x86 compilers will take care of the complete chaos called "the x86 ISA", right? Why should the average the developer, system administrator or hardware enthusiast care?

"Agner goes in great detail why the incompatible SSE-x.x additions and other ISA extensions were and are a pretty bad idea, but let me summarize it in a few quotes:

""The total number of x86 instructions is well above one thousand" (!!)

""CPU dispatching ... makes the code bigger, and it is so costly in terms of development time and maintenance costs that it is almost never done in a way that adequately optimizes for all brands of CPUs."

""the decoding of instructions can be a serious bottleneck, and it becomes worse the more complicated the instruction codes are"

Complete Story

Related Stories:

• IDC Sees Server Business Helped by Intel, AMD(Dec 03, 2009)
• Intel Shows Off 48-Core x86 Processor(Dec 03, 2009)
• Real-time Linux distro boosts multiprocessor support(Dec 01, 2009)
• Can the x86 Just Keep Going?(Oct 05, 2009)
• Linux's x86 vitality bodes well for Moblin project(Aug 21, 2009)