Remix.run Logo
dboreham 11 hours ago

Until I read this I did not know that 1970s microprocessors had register renaming. Feel a little cheated, thinking for all those years that they were actually moving the bits.

dapperdrake 6 hours ago | parent | next [-]

If you work through a math problem with pen and paper or nand2tetris or nandgame.com then it becomes obvious that changing indexes into a register file (a.k.a. pointers) are way faster and easier than wires to move stuff around.

peterfirefly 9 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

How do you think the EXX and EX AF,AF' instructions work on the Z80?

avadodin 8 hours ago | parent [-]

And EX DE, HL

WalterBright 6 hours ago | parent [-]

E to the u, du dx, E to the x, dx!

kens 7 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

If you feel cheated now, wait until you find out that the ALU in the 8-bit Z80 was just 4 bits. :-)

mschaef 2 hours ago | parent [-]

Does this have any similarities at all to the fact that the Pentium 4 used a 16-bit ALU?