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Comment by int0x29 | Hacker News Reader

"Instead of building a custom command processor, Intel uses Movidius’s 32-bit LEON microcontrollers. LEON use the SPARC instruction set and run a real time operating system."

Your Intel core now runs two ISAs and three OSs. Managment engine runs Minix (and used to use the ARC isa).

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More than two. It has x86_64 on the main CPU cores, x86 on the ME, SPARC on this NPU and whatever the iGPU ISA is called. And I wouldn't be surprised if there's an ARM microcontroller or three in there as well.

Didn't some keyboards and mice use embedded Z80 or 6502 CPU's?

Clones of the 8051 are pretty popular in that scenario, I know for sure at least one mouse manufacturer uses them and probably a ton more

One part of me is secretly glad SPARC lives on

It's always weird to see Intel using "foreign" ISAs, but not too surprising for something they acquired. The ME's use of SPARC and ARC before that is more unusual; they could've at least used a 386/486-class core, or even the i860/960 if they wanted something RISC.

Pretty sure ME is Intel Quark based now. Quark is intel's weird 32 bit x86 as a microcontroller chip.

A 32-bit Linux-capable microcontroller at that. I still keep my Galileo board. Will probably assemble it into a picture frame and run a heterogeneous cluster with it and some of the other boards I accumulated over the years.

This is Gibson, the 4 RPi Zero W's running Docker Swarm: https://twitter.com/0xDEADBEEFCAFE/status/172986300775544462...

> This is Gibson, the 4 RPi Zero W's running Docker Swarm: https://twitter.com/0xDEADBEEFCAFE/status/172986300775544462...

You did it, you hacked the Gibson!

Please tell me it has a slick 90s neon low poly 3D interface.

No. It's just an unassuming IKEA picture frame, but I can ssh into them.

Row row row your boat

Quark is basically a 486, with some Pentium instructions added.

It must be a bit depressing for Intel engineers that they are forced to keep themselves tied to the ever extending x86 ISA and can't explore all the other ISAs they use (or invented). The 860/960 generated a lot of buzz back then and there was some pretty capable hardware using it.

Fortunately, with open-source becoming dominant in the data center and the relative ease of bootstrapping a new ISA on top of it, we will see some extra diversity in this space, but I don't think Intel will abandon x86 anytime soon (and "soon" is in almost geological scales here).

Intel could just as well become a pure fab and give up on designing processors. Switching to another ISA might tie them up for years before they can deliver state-of-the-art processors again. Intel can't afford that after the recent year's delays with switching to new nodes.

Intel has been thinking in detail about a streamlined x86 architecture that would ditch all of the cruft: 64-bit only, no memory segmentation, no real mode.

https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/developer/articles/t...

this is very common. lots of companies around (e.g. cadence) that sell SIPs as synthesizable RTL for easy integration into chip designs (and lots of hardware companies buy these SIPs).

Indeed, silicon design is long in its NPM left-pad phase. Which begs the question why it is still so open-source averse and patent-pilled.

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