On Monday 15 May 2006 4:21 pm, Perry Lorier wrote:
Unfortunately most of my assembly language coding was done in the dark ages in the 16 bit dos days. (Segmentation, 640k and TSR's oh my!), and I've really not bothered about what's happening under the hood since then.
Goodness knows how APIC/IOMMU/ACPI work[1] :)
[1] I Realise that implicit in this statement I assume they do *actually* work.
yes indeed. Thank you so much for your insight tho, you have saved me a lot of time researching I dont know what.
Intel chips have always been slow at various things, they've always just done better with clock cycles. A memorable example of this was the LOOP opcode on pentium chips. It was very slow on Intel machines, so programs used it as a timing delay. On AMD chips it was extremely fast (1 cycle IIRC), so those timing loops effectively became noops causing lots of programs to fail in amusing and/or spectacular fashion.
lol theres good reason for not using things for purposes other than intended sometimes :) Would've loved to see the expresions on the faces of the guys at intel as they came across stuff like that. Still every choice has its tradeoffs. -- Your mouse has moved. Windows NT must be restarted for the change to take effect. Reboot now? [ OK ] -- From a Slashdot.org post