Deorbiting i386

Maxim Sobolev sobomax at freebsd.org
Sun May 27 22:15:24 UTC 2018


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
>
>


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