🚀 go-pugleaf

pde...@draper.com (PDeMaio) writes:

>By the way, don't hold your breath for a P6 by next summer.  And if Intel goes 
>to RISC the damn things won't work right with half the stuff anyways, atleast 
>game wise.

Actually, oh skeptical one, Intel looks like they will make the P6 by next
summer, or at the latest the fall.

Meanwhile, Intel and HP are both working on the P7, and they are shooting for
a very new architecture, not CISC or RISC (don't ask how), which will still be
compatible with the Pentium and 486 chips of today.

By the way, people are now saying that Origin is going to be "all Pentium."  I
really don't see how this will exclude the 486 market, since the Pentium only
has one instruction more than the 486.  In other words, what works on the
Pentium also works on 486's.

Also, games optimized for the Pentium does not mean that it will not work on a
486.  Optimization means that the compiler makes code that will utilize the
strengths of the Pentium to full advantage, like the branch prediction, dual
pipelining, and on-chip caches.  It just so happens that this kind of code can
also benefit the 486, since it has its own on-chip cache.

So us "scrubs" with the obsolete 486 systems don't have to worry for a while.
After all, Intel is still developing for the 486 architecture; just look at the
new DX4 Overdrive that they released a week ago.

			- Allen "Ninja" Kim