There was some discussion of the automatic placement in this panel interview.
If I remember correctly, the software that performed the placement was written by a graduate student who debugged it from a terminal at his dormitory. It was one of many project decisions on the i386 that management would have absolutely stopped had they been made aware.
"386 is a complicated processor (by 1980s standards), with 285,000 transistors..."
Interesting that ARM1 was only 25,000 transistors. Did the i386 really have additional features that justify an order of magnitude?
One thing is certain in retrospect: Intel should have bought Acorn, not Olivetti.
Edit: Wow, there is even more detail on the placement software in the Righto article; the software was "Timberwolf" written by Dr. Carl Sechen.
Edit2: It appears that later versions of Timberwolf were sucked into Yale's licensing.
...Sechen served as an expert witness in the Cadence/Avanti trial in 2000 and 2001... "I had a chance to examine a great deal of the code in question when I was an expert witness on the trial. It was amazing – I even saw my own TimberWolf code in their tool, where only a single line of code had been changed. And I don’t mean the earlier, far-inferior version of TimberWolf available from Berkeley. The version I found in Avanti’s suite was a far more state-of-the-art version that had somehow been ‘acquired’ from Yale."
I wouldn’t know. Backwards compatibility certainly is high on the list because, when it was released, many users had fairly high investments in commercial software.
> Interesting that ARM1 was only 25,000 transistors. Did the i386 really have additional features that justify an order of magnitude?
Feature wise, the ARM1 is probably more comparable to the Motorola 68000 from 1979, both have ~16 32bit registers, no MMU and no instruction prefect queue. The ARM1 does have a full 32bit ALU compared to the 68000's 16 bit ALU, and a full 32bit barrel shifter, compared to the 68000's 1 bit shifter.
But the 68000 is still 68,000 transistors (hence the name). So not only is the ARM1 achieving about the same level of functionality with under half the transistors, but it can execute instructions significations faster.
>interesting that ARM1 was only 25,000 transistors. Did the i386 really have additional features that justify an order of magnitude?
you're asking somebody to answer RISC vs CISC in a subthread? there's not simple answer to that question, but the x86 family had a leg up with MSWindows compatibility and the processors they developed maintained that hegemony till they went astray with Itanium and were saved by amd64
I've been in physical design since 1997. Back then we were using Cadence Gate / Silicon Ensemble.
We tried the various Avanti tools. Aquarius, Astro, Apollo. I don't remember the exact order but all the space theme names are where the MilkyWay database comes from that is still in Synopsys IC Compiler.
I remember that when the court actually compared the source code they found that some of the comments had the same words misspelled in the same way. Two programmers may pick the same variable names but they aren't going to misspell words the same way in comments unless it was stolen code.
If I remember correctly, the software that performed the placement was written by a graduate student who debugged it from a terminal at his dormitory. It was one of many project decisions on the i386 that management would have absolutely stopped had they been made aware.
https://www.computerhistory.org/collections/catalog/10270201...
"386 is a complicated processor (by 1980s standards), with 285,000 transistors..."
Interesting that ARM1 was only 25,000 transistors. Did the i386 really have additional features that justify an order of magnitude?
One thing is certain in retrospect: Intel should have bought Acorn, not Olivetti.
Edit: Wow, there is even more detail on the placement software in the Righto article; the software was "Timberwolf" written by Dr. Carl Sechen.
Edit2: It appears that later versions of Timberwolf were sucked into Yale's licensing.
...Sechen served as an expert witness in the Cadence/Avanti trial in 2000 and 2001... "I had a chance to examine a great deal of the code in question when I was an expert witness on the trial. It was amazing – I even saw my own TimberWolf code in their tool, where only a single line of code had been changed. And I don’t mean the earlier, far-inferior version of TimberWolf available from Berkeley. The version I found in Avanti’s suite was a far more state-of-the-art version that had somehow been ‘acquired’ from Yale."
http://www.aycinena.com/index2/index3/archive/uw%20-%20seche...
Edit3: Graywolf is a fork of the last free version of Yale's Timberwolf.
https://github.com/rubund/graywolf