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Comment by FullyFunctional | Hacker News Reader

I would agree with the analysis, but I think it's missing an interesting fact: The ARM threat was non-existant until DEC Alpha engineers created StrongARM and showed the world that you could make a fast ARM. StrongARM was effectively renamed XScale around the time Intel got hold of the IP.

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Former DEC Alpha engineers also proved you could make a power-efficient PPC at P.A. Semi, and were involved in the early versions of the MIPS SoC line that is now owned by Broadcom.

Really it's hard to find a platform that isn't from Intel from the last 20 or so years that doesn't show an influence from them.

Precisely, and let's not forget AMD64, while Intel was pushing Itanium.

Oh, good point, I had forgotten about SledgeHammer and its descendants. Intel had to pull some shady stuff to not lose a lot of market-share while the extracted themselves from the NetBurst dead-end.

It's sad that many places call it x86_64 while it's actually amd64. If Itanium had been a success and AMD built such chips, they wouldn't call it aa64 but ia64 like the existing name. Hence, it would only be fair to keep calling it AMD64. I don't know if it's just Intel not being comfortable with selling CPUs that implement AMD64. Maybe that's why we have ARM64 and AArch64 for the same thing, one vendor neutral, one with ARM in it. I really don't understand what's so wrong with giving credit. It's not like Intel's shareholders would care.

Because AMD64 is actually distinct from Intel's implementation, which has some subtle differences - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/X86-64#Differences_between_AMD...

The AMD64 usage implies non-compatibility with EM64T..

Yeah, but given the various names others came up for it, it would have been nice to have one short name. It's normal for difference to exist even withing revisions of a chip, so it wouldn't have hurt anyone to use one name, When we say x86, we mean everything Intel from the 1980s until now, including Cyrix, AMD, Via, etc. 32bit or 64bit.

Yeah, but given the various names others came up for it, it would have been nice to have one short name.

Colloquially, "x64" works pretty well.

Yep, it's quite odd but works, though many dismiss it as the inferior name, no idea why.

> and showed the world that you could make a fast ARM.

My memory may be a bit hazy, but wasn't one of the demonstrations of the original ARM a program in interpreted BASIC that did in twenty seconds something for which a compiled C program on a 80386 needed thirty seconds? Or something like that?

That's demonstrating you can make a fast BASIC on an ARM. What I'm talking about is making a faster ARM cpu. According to Wikipedia, StrongArm debuted at 233 MHz. I can't remember how fast the contemporary implementations were at the time, but I remember that 233 MHz was a lot faster. (For the record: I'm neither fan of ARM nor x86).

It seems to have been introduced the same year as Pentium 2 which had clock rates of 233-300 MHz. I don't know about the architectural differences at that time, but at least currently Intel processors smoke ARMs with same clock rate. The difference was probably a lot less pronounced at that time as the architectures were simpler.

The Pentium 2 was an out-of-order CPU, StrongARM was in-order.

IIRC, StrongARM was about 5-10x faster than contemporary (non-DEC) ARM chips of the time, which topped out around 30-40MHz.

What made BASIC blisteringly quick on it was that the BASIC interpreter that Acorn had originally written for their ARM-based micros was small enough to fit into the instruction cache on the StrongARM. (According to Wikipedia, StrongARM was 16kb I + 16kb D cache, a Harvard Architecture; whereas the Acorn designed cpus only had a 4kb unified cache at the time.) BASIC programs (which were byte-coded) were enormously faster on the StrongARM.

There were two experiments that caught my memory back then.

The first was them trying to understand why the ARM chip they had on a test board was working, despite the fact that the power supply wasn't plugged in. It transpired that there was leakage currents from the keyboard which ended up giving the CPU enough power. (Discussed in a Computerphile YouTube video on the origins of ARM.)

The other was a demo of showing an ARM chip being powered off a thermocouple of the waste heat from a 286 (or maybe 386 ... either way an old Intel CPU)

My also hazy memory recalls that at the launch of the Newton, its CPU (ARM610 I think) was described as more powerful than a 486, at the time the chip to lust after.

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