Fergus, Steve, On Friday 15 July 2005 02:22, Fergus Wilde wrote:
On Friday 15 July 2005 08:18, steve wrote: ...
what's the difference between what I use, an AMDX2200 and a Sparc? Steve
SPARC is an architecture in the sense that x86 PCs and Macs are architectures - software compiled for one won't run on another. They use different components, processors and so on. Typical desktop SPARC machines included things like Sun Ultras and Blades.
That's close, but not quite right. When people talk about a processor architecture or a CPU architecture, they're usually talking about a programming model. That is, what an assembly programmer or compiler writer needs to know to make the machine do what is intended. It does include things like instruction set, register complement, memory access and addressing model, etc. The Mac is not an architecture, but PowerPC (PPC) is. An PC is not an architecture, but the x86 is. There are many architectures. In addition to these, there's MIPS, SPARC, MC68000 and others. On the other hand, the AMD's counterparts to Intel's x86 and x86_64 processors are completely different implementations of the original Intel architectures. Where they not, software written for Intel processors would not run on AMDs. What differences there are between different implementations of an architecture usually matter only to operating system coders and compiler writers, though in some cases things like special-purpose or optional instruction sets are relevant to a particular class of application. An example of this is the MMX instructions on Intel chips or the Altivec instructions on the PPC.
That's about as much as I know ... HTH Fergus
Randall Schulz