What's so bad about Intel 8086 in technical terms?

[commodorejohn]

ARM's getting to the point of being quite adequate for users who don't require a high-performance gaming machine, though - and it does it at a lower price and a lot less power consumption. Its biggest handicap is that the only software support it has outside of iOS and Android is experimental nerd OSes like the free Unices, AROS, or RISC OS. Interesting stuff to be sure, but nothing that could make it a serious competitor in the general market.

[commodorejohn]

Nothing stands in the way of progress more than "good enough".

But, but, but bloodline! Don't you know that Worse is Better? People on the Internet said it, so it must be true!

[commodorejohn]

Perhaps Amiga would have gone with MIPS and some more unix like sw?

Good Lord no. MIPS was still professional Unix workstation stuff in 1985. The Amiga didn't pick 68k because IBM didn't, they picked it because it was a powerful but cost-effective architecture for the time.

[commodorejohn]

Precisely. The whole thing hinged around compatibility with the IBM PC architecture pretty much from the start. There were a few points (OS/2 on PPC and NT on Alpha) where it looked like there might've been a chance of breaking off and doing legacy support in emulation, but it never took.

[commodorejohn]

ARM is the sole survivor and they are concentrating on the tablet/phone half of the market.   PPC is for all intents and purposes dead after being abandoned by the game console makers.

Keep repeating that; it won't make it true.

[commodorejohn]

The best solution to most problems are hybrids.

Like Windows 8!

[commodorejohn]

By your simplistic (though not wholy inaccurate definition), the x86 is actually a RISC machine! Since it's non orthogonal ISA often requires one to load data into Registers for processing and then written back to the main memory.

That's not what "load-store architecture" means and you freakin' know it. Load-store means only performing operations on registers. x86 is more than happy to do quite a number of operations with one or more operands being in memory.

To be frank, only the MIPS every really fully implemented all the RISC concepts... And look where that is now!

Yeah, I mean, it was only in the PSP, that's all! That was only the second most popular handheld gaming system on the market in its recently-concluded run!

[commodorejohn]

Much software can work with 32-bit space. So 64-bit environments may be stuck in some ways with more bits than really needed. Which will bloat code.

Depends on the architecture. Not every CPU confines itself to using instructions exactly the same length as its word size. These days they try to make it less arbitrary, so as to keep instruction fetch simple (you want your instructions to always be an even divisor of the data bus size, and to always be aligned on an even boundary, so that one instruction doesn't require two separate fetches,) but plenty of 64-bit architectures use 32-bit instruction words.

[commodorejohn]

I didn't, I said the CISC instructions were translated into micro-ops at runtime. Translated means that as each instruction is fetched the frontend writes a new program and stores it in fast cache ram which the backend then executes.

Does it really actually write the sequence to an internal writable control store? I'd think it would be simpler to just execute directly from an internal ROM, but I guess maybe that wouldn't have been fast enough...?
 

It's not new, it's been around since the 90's. But it was new then.

It's been around much, much longer than that, actually. Mainframes and minis were doing it since the '70s at least.