On Sunday 13 November 2005 04:29, Sid Boyce wrote:
If you are AMD, you understand that Intel is likely to unleash some features to render your hardware obsolete in a timeframe that you can't react to speedily enough,
No actually, I don't. You see, the problem is that Intel can't make AMD machines obsolete without at the same time making their own machines obsolete, which the market won't accept. This is why Itanium failed so miserably. Intel is simply locked into its own past.
with the need for redesigning and retooling, so recoding in microcode gives you the ability to swiftly respond. For years that's how we at Amdahl were able to stay with the twists and turns by IBM that were designed to kill us off.
I think that's slightly different, since the mainframe market is far lower volume, IBM is/was in contact with each of their customers (who in many cases didn't buiy, they leased), so their ability to introduce new, incompatible features is/was far higher than Intel's will ever be
When IBM started off on that road, we didn't have microcode, so we had to add a FAM (Fast Assist Mode) so that when the new instructions generated an exception, they could be emulated by substituting a series of software instructions - so Microcode and Macrocode appeared in our succeeding products. An ex-colleague remarked last week how amazing it is that the latest greatest stuff like Xen has been standard on mainframes (Amdahl MDF followed by IBM LPAR's) for decades. Eventually IBM got us, not by technology, but by nearly going under themselves.
mainframes created almost all technology we see today. I have said many times that the past 30 or so years in computer development could have been skipped by giving the 3270 3D accelerated graphics