Hacker News new | past | comments | ask | show | jobs | submit login

> while Intel's elaborate addressing modes introduced with the 386 are producing code size and cache efficiency benefits to this very day.

At the expense of orthogonality, which I think is a great feature for a CPU to have and which the 68K (and 6809 and 6800) had in spades.




Hmm, wasn't the 386 addressing modes pretty much orthogonal? (At least, compared to what 8086 and 80286 had.)


Yes, but the instruction set wasn't. Orthogonality in an instruction set basically means that you know what basic instructions a processor supports, which addressing modes it supports and that allows you to create all possible combinations and they will just work as expected without gaps or strange insertions and if you look at the opcodes you'll be able to make sense of them.




Guidelines | FAQ | Lists | API | Security | Legal | Apply to YC | Contact

Search: