THe difference

[pantoffel]

Hi,

I was wondering what the difrents are between :
x86
sparc
PowerPC

I was olso wondering if there are difrent types op processors for those arch (for x86 you have intel, amd ... )
To be honest , i never heard\used a Sparc or a PowerPC , so can someone please explain me in nOOb
langue the difrents between those arch , and what makes them so great.

[Lovechild]

Power PC (PPC) is used in Macs mostly (I don't know any other computers that use these chips)

Sparc is mostly used in Sun Servers, hefty bastards..

[squanto]

I'm not all that up on the stuff, but here goes:
PPC is a RISC based architecture. Sparc is as well, I think, but not sure. While x86 is CISC. Sparc and PPC are not the same, they are not even made by similar companies. IBM and moto make PPC while sun makes the sparc.
RISC stands for reduced instruction set while CISC stands for complicated instruction set.

Basically with a CISC machine, each instruction that the cpu can do can be any length up to around 7 or 8 bytes (i think). So some instructions are only 1 byte like pushing one register onto the stack. While doing a complicated multiply ( like: 0f af 44 9e fc imul 0xfffffffc(%esi,%ebx,4),%eax, which is multiplying numbers in an array by the value in eax and storing the result into eax) can be much longer. CISC also incorperates lots of old outdated instructions that aren't really used anymore.

On RISC, every instruction is the same length, so a simple push or a complicated multiply will both be the same length. This has advantages, as on average the instructions are usually shorter and get executed faster. Also, part of the "reduced" is the fact that unneeded instructions are not included for the processor.

Also, on most IA-32 (32 bit intel) processors, there are only a few general purpose registers, registers hold values that the processor are working on at the moment. Whereas in some chips there will be something on the order of upto 32 registers, which can improve performance.

Some of the sparc systems (if not all) are 64 bit as well, which is important for certain apps, and for being able to use over 4GB of ram, which many people are starting to need in engineering and graphic design.

Im not quite sure the differences between intel and amd, they both have to conform to the x86 standard, so in that sense they are very similar. Although the way that the pentium 4 and the athlon do computations are slightly different. The differences are not that great, but for one thing, the pentium4 has a very long pipeline which means that it takes longer for any one thing to happen, but that they can crank up the clock speed like the bejesus, while amd has shorter and wider pipelines so they can do more per clock cycle, this is why amd is pushing their comparisons between amd chips and intel, such as the 2000+XP, saying that it is equivilent to a 2GHz pentium4.

PPC chips, made by IBM and motorola are used in IBMs blade servers and their R/S6000 series computers as well as some of their mainframes I believe.

If you want more info, intel has lots of stuff on their site, you just have to find it, while if you want info on sun stuff, have fun. Sun's site is almost impossible to find anything on

If I have confused you more than you were before, let me know and I will try to clear up my self.

-Andrew

[SanitysEj]

Squanto,

If you're "not all that up on stuff", I believe that a person who was would give me far too much material to digest in one sitting.
My point, thanx much for the post, It was very informative and fairly well put together.
Kudos
_________________
Universally,
Ej

"Try?! There is no Try!!! There is do, and there is do not!!!!" -YODA

[pantoffel]

[squanto]

[squanto]

Actually.... (now that I think about it some...) My examples of how x86 code can be long probably weren't the best picked ones... but it was the idea that counts
Either way, I think I got what I was trying to say across....

-Andrew