Deorbiting i386

[Maxim Sobolev]

P.S.. Another interesting thing to consider is that original Intel patents
on i386 are going to expire sooner or later. Give it some time and we might
see completely open source i386 IPs one day, free for anyone to grab and
use. By today's standards i386 is rather trivial platform with many
independent commercial implementations already done by compact well focused
teams  (cyrix, transmeta etc).

-Max

On Sun, May 27, 2018, 3:15 PM Maxim Sobolev <sobomax at freebsd.org> wrote:

> Well, strip extra 32 bits, use slower memory and busses (extra decoding
> logic etc). Voila, you suddenly have platform that can run 99% of code in
> wild today with just few hundred mW of power. Try that with arm32, you
> would be surprised how many software is technically compiling and all that,
> but has some weird runtime issues with either byte order or unaligned
> memory accesses. Not even mention performance issues due to the lack of
> hand-crafted JITs.
>
> Throwing away all that wealth is like shooting yourself in a foot...with a
> bazooka.
>
> -Max
>
> On Sat, May 26, 2018, 12:58 AM David Chisnall <theraven at freebsd.org>
> wrote:
>
>> On 26 May 2018, at 00:41, Maxim Sobolev <sobomax at FreeBSD.org> wrote:
>> >
>> > If you've seen any of the atom bay trail systems in action you may
>> understand what I mean. You get full blown x64 system with four cores and
>> it takes only 2W of power.
>>
>> Which is pretty much my point - if you want a low-power x86 system for
>> embedded use, it’s going to be x86-64, not x86-32 (though hopefully you’re
>> using a 32-bit ABI with it).
>>
>> David
>>
>>