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wallopinski 3 days ago

Well duh, the IFU. :) No, I was fond of the FPU because the math was just so bonkers. The way division was performed with complete disregard to the rules taught to gradeschoolers always fascinated me. Bob Colwell told us that P6 was the last architecture one person could understand completely.

Tooling & Languages: IHDL, a templating layer on top of HDL that had a preprocessor for intel-specific macros. DART test template generator for validation coverage vectors. The entire system was stitched together with PERL, TCL, and shellscripts, and it all ran on three OSes: AIX, HPUX and SunOS. (I had a B&W sparcstation and was jealous of the 8514/a 1024x768 monitors on AIX.) We didn't go full Linux until Itanic and by then we were using remote computing via Exceed and gave up our workstations for generic PCs. When I left in the mid 2000's, not much had changed in the glue/automation languages, except a little less Tcl. I'm blanking on the specific formal verification tool, I think it was something by Cadence. Synthesis and timing was ... design compiler and primetime? Man. Cobwebs. When I left we were 100% Cadence and Synopsys and Verilog (minus a few custom analog tools based on SPICE for creating our SSAs). That migration happened during Bonnell, but gahd it was painful. Especially migrating all the Pentium/486/386/286/8088 test vectors.

I have no idea what it is like ~20 years later (gasp), but I bet the test vectors live on, like Henrietta Lacks' cells. I'd be interested to hear from any Intelfolk reading this?