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Politics : Formerly About Advanced Micro Devices -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: brushwud who wrote (98349)	3/14/2000 10:48:00 AM
From: Daniel Schuh	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 1580718

Aside from the early availability of the 8086, I was told at the time that another big deal was Intel's broader range of support circuitry. Plus, the 8 bit data path of the 8088 saved IBM probably $20 or so in parts costs on the $1-2k original PC. The original 68000, which was most computer people's favorite design at the time, was supposedly laid out by hand with colored plastic? It supposedly made IBM somewhat nervous that a design of that complexity wasn't CAD based. Among the Z8000, 8086, and 68k, there was also an interesting split in the use of microcode. The z8000 was supposed to be all random logic, which contributed to it being late, late, late. The 68k had Nick Trendenick's famous 2 level microcode/nanocode system, which was pretty cool but perhaps overkill. It also was most of the way to being a 32 bit system, architecturally. The 8086 was relatively straightforward in its microcode approach, I think. It also had the lamest ISA, by standards of the time, an odd cross of 360-ish register modes in a pdp-11-ish 8 registers and 16 bit address space. The 16 bit address space was widely acknowledged as a big mistake by the DEC people right away, but Intel had to repeat the mistake to make sure everybody understood it good. The idea of using user mode registers for segment management was considered a botch in the 360 architecture too, Intel made sure that the nature of that botch was more widely understood also. All relatively ancient history, of course, in that time frame Intel was mostly known for being first to market with maybe not the best solution technically, but good enough. Cheers, Dan.