Jump to content

Talk:x86

Page contents not supported in other languages.
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

This is an old revision of this page, as edited by 139.210.138.217 (talk) at 23:15, 19 January 2016 (Is there anything wrong with this table?). The present address (URL) is a permanent link to this revision, which may differ significantly from the current revision.

WikiProject iconComputing C‑class High‑importance
WikiProject iconThis article is within the scope of WikiProject Computing, a collaborative effort to improve the coverage of computers, computing, and information technology on Wikipedia. If you would like to participate, please visit the project page, where you can join the discussion and see a list of open tasks.
CThis article has been rated as C-class on Wikipedia's content assessment scale.
HighThis article has been rated as High-importance on the project's importance scale.
Taskforce icon
This article is supported by Computer hardware task force (assessed as Top-importance).


Itanium

50-bits of physical memory addressing and 64-bits of virtual addressing

from itanium-9000-9100-datasheet.pdf and itanium-9300-9500-datasheet.pdf, useful or not. 119.51.184.193 (talk) 00:30, 15 February 2015 (UTC)[reply]

Perhaps useful on the Itanium page or the Montecito (processor) and Tukwila (processor) pages; not relevant to the very-definitely-non-IA-64/Itanium x86 instruction set so not useful on this page. Guy Harris (talk) 01:12, 15 February 2015 (UTC)[reply]
OK, this is another sock puppet of Janagewen, I am fighting for the fair and freedom of Wikipedia.org all the time for ever, OK, but is the information of that table relating with Itanium correct or not? 221.9.23.11 (talk) 01:18, 15 February 2015 (UTC)[reply]
It might depend on the chip and, in any case, unlike the Atom chips (which are standard x86 chips) and the Transmeta chips (which aren't supposed to run anything other than the Code Morphing Software and code that the CMS has translated natively; the operating system and application code that's run on it is IA-32 code). those Itanium chips that ran IA-32 code in hardware ran it as a compatibility mode, similar to PDP-11 compatibility mode on some VAXes, so the addressing limits for the IA-64/Itanium instruction set are completely irrelevant to its IA-32 engine, and don't belong here. Guy Harris (talk) 01:46, 15 February 2015 (UTC)[reply]
OK, I would wait till 15 April 2015 to blank the relate information on that table. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 221.9.23.11 (talk) 02:21, 15 February 2015 (UTC)[reply]

regarding protected mode

according to computer experts i talked to during the 90s protected mode was not available on the 80286. it was first available on the 80386. 84.213.45.196 (talk) 16:15, 9 July 2015 (UTC)[reply]

You presumably mean "experts", in quotes, as no actual expert, i.e. no actual knowledgable person, would say that. The 80286 most definitely did have protected mode - the reference for that on the protected mode page is:
  • "2.1.2 The Intel 286 Processor (1982)". Intel 64 and IA-32 Architectures Software Developer's Manual. Denver, Colorado: Intel. May 2007. p. 34.
What the 80286 didn't have was support for demand paging; it didn't divide any address space into fixed-length pages, each of which can be present in memory or absent.
It may not have been used as much on the 286 by the main operating systems for x86 processors, but there were definitely operating systems for the 286 that did use it, such as various UNIX ports and OS/2. Guy Harris (talk) 17:44, 9 July 2015 (UTC)[reply]
i tried to run games requiring protected mode on a 80286 and they would not work because it did not have protected mode. it could however run any super vga requiring game that did not require protected mode.84.213.45.196 (talk) 20:49, 9 July 2015 (UTC)[reply]
No, they didn't work because the 286 didn't have the right type of protected mode for the software you were trying to run. As the protected mode article says in the section on the 286:
The initial protected mode, released with the 286, was not widely used.[1] It was used for example by Microsoft Xenix (around 1984),[2] by Coherent,[3] and by Minix.[4] Several shortcomings such as the inability to access the BIOS or DOS calls due to inability to switch back to real mode without resetting the processor prevented widespread usage.[5] Acceptance was additionally hampered by the fact that the 286 only allowed memory access in 16 bit segments via each of four segment registers, meaning only 4*216 bytes, equivalent to 256 kilobytes, could be accessed at a time.[1] Because changing a segment register in protected mode caused a 6-byte segment descriptor to be loaded into the CPU from memory, the segment register load instruction took many tens of processor cycles, making it much slower than on the 8086; therefore, the strategy of computing segment addresses on-the-fly in order to access data structures larger than 128 kilobytes (the combined size of the two data segments) became impractical, even for those few programmers who had mastered it on the 8086/8088.

References

  1. ^ a b Kaplan, Yariv (1997). "Introduction to Protected-Mode" (Article). Internals.com. Retrieved 2007-07-24.
  2. ^ http://www.tenox.net/docs/microsoft_xenix_30_286_press_release.pdf
  3. ^ http://textfiles.com/internet/FAQ/coherent.faq
  4. ^ http://minix.net/minix/minix.html
  5. ^ Mueller, Scott (March 24, 2006). "P2 (286) Second-Generation Processors". Upgrading and Repairing PCs, 17th Edition (Book) (17 ed.). Que. ISBN 0-7897-3404-4. Retrieved July 2007. {{cite book}}: Check date values in: |accessdate= (help); External link in |chapterurl= (help); Unknown parameter |chapterurl= ignored (|chapter-url= suggested) (help)
and the section on the 386 indicates that the 80386 fixed several of those issues - it offered a larger flat address space and made it easier to return to real mode from protected mode.
So your games that "required protected mode" really required the IA-32 version of protected mode, not just protected mode. Guy Harris (talk) 21:14, 9 July 2015 (UTC)[reply]
this. the inability of the 286 to switch from protected mode into to real mode (because that would have violated protection) made the use of 286 protected mode not backward compatible with x86 DOS. at that time, "IBM PCs" needed to be backward compatible to be successful in the market, so protected mode could only be used on the limited number of devices that didn't need DOS backward compatibility. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 96.246.59.19 (talk) 17:44, 11 October 2015 (UTC)[reply]
(Or on one of the limited number of IBM PCs that were running an operating system that didn't offer the ability to run arbitrary DOS applications, such as the various UNIX ports to the 286. But, again, "limited number", and you aren't going to be running DOS games there.) Guy Harris (talk) 19:16, 11 October 2015 (UTC)[reply]

Sources?

Originally I wrote -

These "generation" numbers appear to have no reliable source and seem to have been made up. This issue has been brought up at least twice in the past and I've never gotten an answer. If reliable sources are not forthcoming I'm going to delete the column. Jeh (talk) 20:19, 21 September 2015 (UTC)[reply]

However, this complaint applies to the entire table.

This table has collected a tremendous amount of "information" over the years and not a single item in it has a source.

If sources are not forthcoming, the whole thing has to go. Just having a serial sockpuppet and a longtime editor agree on changes is not enough.

Also, this table falls into the "parts list" category. A table of model names and features is not encyclopedic. If you want to see how information like this should be presented, take a look at the History of IBM magnetic disk drives article. It describes the significant changes in the progression of development of this technology, with information about why each change was significant and how it was used. Sadly, that article is also mostly unreferenced, but that's another matter. Jeh (talk) 20:29, 21 September 2015 (UTC)[reply]

Hello! Well, we all know that providing sources is absolutely necessary in all articles. The table provides a very good overview, there's no doubt about that, but it also needs sources. — Dsimic (talk | contribs) 02:22, 9 October 2015 (UTC)[reply]
It's not just the lack of sources. The choice of assignment of various CPU models to "generations", with a single row for a single generation number and a single set of "notable features" supposedly applying to multiple vendors, is pure OR. Jeh (talk) 05:45, 19 January 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Is there anything wrong with this table?

In our high school. most students said this table is much better than the old one. So if someone want to get rid of it, please show the mistakes which this table has, please! — Preceding unsigned comment added by 46.105.38.84 (talk) 06:55, 22 December 2015 (UTC)[reply]

This article is subject to repeated attack by POV-pushing sockpuppets who don't know what they're talking about. As a result, so many changes in one edit cannot be accepted without discussion and evaluation by more seasoned editors. The opinion of your high school students (assuming you haven't just made that claim up) is, frankly, irrelevant.
Moreover, there was a fundamental problem with the table even before these changes: it is completely without references. Adding dozens of new unreferenced claims is not an improvement, no matter how correct or useful they turn out to be.
If you want to improve the table, add references for every claim in the existing table. Better do it soon: It's had a refimprove tag on it for months; if references don't show up soon I'm going to nuke the whole thing.
After that, we can talk about adding more referenced details. Jeh (talk) 07:28, 22 December 2015 (UTC)[reply]
@46.105.38.84:, thank you for your appreciation. @Jeh:, if you think the table on the main article is a mess. I suggest you to re-create a new one rather than making piss, all right?
Best Regards
Aaron Janagewen