Intel (was Re:GUI)

[Henry Spencer]

On Sun, 30 Nov 2003, Peter L. Peres wrote:
> > nothing in current AMD CPUs that requires tithing to Intel.  They most
> > certainly are *NOT* making duplicates of Intel's designs -- the AMD ones
> > are markedly better.
> 
> I understand that AMD had to reverse engineer Intel chips (in the sense of
> functional reverse engineering) for quite a while before things settled
> into the current state, with only 'minor' differences in features and
> setup.

Yep, but that wasn't a question of discovering Intel's implementation
methods (or at least, not *primarily* that), but rather a question of
getting enough information to write a complete and precise specification
of the user-visible behavior, something Intel had quietly neglected to do
for its fancier CPUs.  If your aim is to be "bug-for-bug compatible" with
(e.g.) a Pentium(*), you need to understand its behavior in great detail.

(* Well, okay, there were one or two bugs they didn't duplicate...  I
recall a hilarious AMD ad offering 100 reasons to use their CPUs; circa
number 97 was "Can do hard mathematical problems, like division.")

                                                          Henry Spencer
                                                       henry-lqW1N6Cllo0sV2N9l4h3zg at public.gmane.org

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