Hi folks,
With Apple going with the x86, presumably the Pentium D, what implications at the ISA level can we make? The Pentium D has a sort of 64 bit address mode, but I can't find details on the registers or their width. I know a bit about the heritage, but have not kept up with internals of these CPUs for years. From an API PoV, how does the Pentium D handle long long values (e.g. 64 bit integers)? It will be interesting to discover how much the 64 bitness processor characteristics will be effected here. I'm not totally surprised about the switch, but I do have concerns. I'm still considering an upgrade to the 2Ghz G5 iMac unless something better is announced in the next week. For me, that would be a 4x upgrade right now in terms of functional, system level processing power compared to my 800Mhz G4 iMac. This will definitely, though, effect my decision on Mac notebook purchases. Well, I guess we can now say we officially live in interesting times.
Respectfully,
Joe Crowe
With Apple going with the x86, presumably the Pentium D, what implications at the ISA level can we make? The Pentium D has a sort of 64 bit address mode, but I can't find details on the registers or their width. I know a bit about the heritage, but have not kept up with internals of these CPUs for years. From an API PoV, how does the Pentium D handle long long values (e.g. 64 bit integers)? It will be interesting to discover how much the 64 bitness processor characteristics will be effected here. I'm not totally surprised about the switch, but I do have concerns. I'm still considering an upgrade to the 2Ghz G5 iMac unless something better is announced in the next week. For me, that would be a 4x upgrade right now in terms of functional, system level processing power compared to my 800Mhz G4 iMac. This will definitely, though, effect my decision on Mac notebook purchases. Well, I guess we can now say we officially live in interesting times.
Respectfully,
Joe Crowe