![]() ![]() This episode was first aired on February 28, 2013.Newer versions of MacOS can sometimes have trouble installing Intel Power Gadget, and many MacOS Mojave users have discovered the installation fails or the app doesn’t work. Accessed February 26, 2013.Īll pictures - the 8086 microprocessor, ARM processor and the IBM PC - are from Wikimedia Commons. Accessed February 26, 2013.ĪRM Architecture. I�m Andy Boyd at the University of Houston, where we�re interested in the way inventive minds work.Ī comparison of RISC and CISC (Complex Instruction Set Computing) can be found at the website. But with so much money on the line, it�s certain to be a clash of powerful interests. Perhaps the two technologies will converge. Perhaps ARM technology is set to dethrone the royal lineage of the 8086. But 8086 descendants tend to draw a lot of power. It�s still around because it does a pretty good job, and because the computing ecosystem is hopelessly tangled in its roots. The technology was right, and the world of mobile devices is now dominated by processors using the ARM instruction set.īut PCs, laptops, and most of the non-mobile world are still dominated by extensions of Intel�s old instruction set. So in 1990 Apple led a consortium including Acorn that spun off a new company, Advanced RISC Machines, known today simply as ARM. And that made them ideal for mobile devices - phones, tablets, audio players, you name it. ![]() But the instruction set didn�t, because RISC processors used far less power than alternatives. The Newton flopped - that�s another story. Apple wanted a processor for its newest gadget, the Newton - a forerunner of the iPad. But fortuitously, Acorn began working with none other than Apple Computers. Unfortunately, that�s not how things worked out. Acorn was ready to take on the market for PCs. By the mid 1980s the company had a processor to go with it. Sophie Wilson, who worked at Acorn, designed a new RISC instruction set. Among the companies experimenting with RISC was Acorn Computers, a small firm based in Cambridge, England. The name given to this approach went by the acronym RISC, for Reduced Instruction Set Computing.Īnd here�s where the story takes a turn. ![]() If an instruction set had simpler instructions, but worked very efficiently with a processor, computers would get faster. Instead of introducing ever more complicated instructions, researchers advocated the opposite. In the early 1980s academic research challenged the notion that more was better. New, more complex commands were included as the instruction set matured.īright as the future looked for Intel and its followers, competition lurked just over the horizon. New, more powerful PC processors would emerge, but all were built on top of the 8086 instruction set. From that point on there was no looking back. An extension of the 8086 instruction set burst onto the scene inside the earliest PCs from IBM. Processors are tightly intertwined with their instruction sets - commands that tell the processor what to do. It was the year Intel produced a processor whose descendants would dominate computing to this day: the not-so-elegantly-named 8086. The year 1978 was a landmark in the history of computing. The University of Houston�s College of Engineering presents this series about the machines that make our civilization run, and the people whose ingenuity created them.
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