Arty computers

[Jim Leonard]

Chuck Guzis wrote:
>> Okay, just making sure.  On 486, it was break-even; on Pentium, it was 
>> indeed faster for most cases to pair instructions.  (Although, if you 
>> wanted to get fancy, you could copy memory even faster by loading 64 
>> bits at a time into the FPU registers, then storing them out...)
> 
> Yeah, but then you wouldn't have code that would run on *any*  x86.  

True, but you wouldn't want to do the mov; dec; mov; jnz on anything 
less than a 386, it's way too slow compared to rep movs.

> To be fair, however, in a bunch of my code, I did have a routine that 
> started out:
> 
>         mov     Is_x86,0				; assume neither 286 nor 386
>         push    sp
>         pop     ax
>         cmp     ax,sp                   ; see if the same
>         jne     Init2                       ; if not 2/386
>         inc      Is_x86			   ; it's at least a 286
>         .486
>         sgdt    scratch                 ; stash the GDT
>         .8086
>         mov     al,byte ptr scratch+5
>         test    al,al
>         jnz     Init2
>      	  inc	Is_x86	                    ; at least a 386
> Init2:
> 
> so I could make use of those 32 bit registers for moving data around 
> and calculating CRCs and such. 

Hey, that's neat...  I've never seen that technique (global descriptor 
table) before.  I used to check if pushf/popf preserved the Alignment 
Check bit (386=no, 486=yes).

> That's one of the awful inequities of "improved" CPUs; something like 
> processor social economics.  A trick used to exploit a faster CPU 
> will often run more slowly on the lower CPU than if you had left in 
> the non-tricky code.  So the folks with older CPUs sometimes get 
> penalized additionally through no fault of their own.

As someone whose only computer was a 7MHz 8086 from 1985 to 1991, I was 
able to experience this firsthand.  I later replaced with an NEC V30 so 
that "286" programs would work (99% of the time, the only "286" thing 
about a program was SHR/SHL/ROR/ROL by an operand greater than 1, which 
the NEC V30 could do) but they certainly didn't work well.
-- 
Jim Leonard (trixter at oldskool.org)            http://www.oldskool.org/
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