Comment Re:What we programmer needs ... (Score 2) 51
The ironic part is that an X86 instruction hasn't been mapped to dedicated hardware for decades. It just signals a series of micro-ops to perform the calculation.
That started back when we were still doing most of our applications in assembly... and people were begging Intel for the most arbitrary of operations in-silicon.
Then of course when we switched to compilers only about 10% of those operations were used 90% of the time... which is why ARM got so efficient and cheap... because they built their committee around that Turing-complete small set of instructions that compilers would most likely use... rather than Intel's obfuscation to make assembly programmers not want to light themselves up in a gas fire.
So I guess... sort of a bad example?
That started back when we were still doing most of our applications in assembly... and people were begging Intel for the most arbitrary of operations in-silicon.
Then of course when we switched to compilers only about 10% of those operations were used 90% of the time... which is why ARM got so efficient and cheap... because they built their committee around that Turing-complete small set of instructions that compilers would most likely use... rather than Intel's obfuscation to make assembly programmers not want to light themselves up in a gas fire.
So I guess... sort of a bad example?