davidsen@crdos1.crd.ge.COM (Wm E Davidsen Jr) (12/17/90)
Let's pretend that we have the ear of the chip designers at Intel,
and that they have asked our opinion on what windows support should be
included in the new Intel 586. Please hold any negative comments about
Intel, CISC, etc, it's all been said...
The questions:
What features should be put into the CPU to improve performance and
reduce chip count?
Will assumptions about graphics memory organization be made, and if so
what are they?
Do we assume that support will be:
a) all general purpose
b) mostly MS-windows
c) mostly X-windows
Start of opinion:
From what little info I have, the 486 sales are going first to people
using them as servers, second to people running a multitasking o/s,
mostly unix, and only third to DOS power users. You can assume that all
unix means SysV right now, and that other multitasking systems include
Desqview, ms-windows, DR-DOS, and other environments to support DOS
programs.
Given that servers probably don't need graphics in most installations,
I would assume that X-windows has the largest user base of any single
window system, although it may be less than half the market.
I believe that the time has come when enough address space is
available to allow direct mapping of graphics memory into memory on the
ISA and EISA bus, and that these busses will be used in the majority of
systems using Intel CPUs for the next two years or more. The performance
bottleneck of mapping a MB of data into 64k of address space would be
severe, even if it were done well. Cheap processors now have enough
address space to allow investing some of it in graphics.
--
bill davidsen (davidsen@crdos1.crd.GE.COM -or- uunet!crdgw1!crdos1!davidsen)
VMS is a text-only adventure game. If you win you can use unix.