Comments by "Mikko Rantalainen" (@MikkoRantalainen) on "X86 Needs To Die" video.

  1. I'm actually surprised that @ThePrimeTime didn't already know all the stuff discussed in this video. I was expecting that every good developer already understood CPUs at this level. I think x86 and x86-64 assembly should be considered as command protocol and the actual hardware runs micro-ops instead. And yes, there's also hardware to convert this command protocol to micro-ops format. This conversion can be improved and next gen CPUs have better and better converters built in hardware. I guess in long run we might even have hardware tracing JIT compiler for this conversion! If you hardcoded the micro-ops in the binary assembly, then the manufacturers couldn't improve this part and you'd be always limited by micro-ops execution bandwidth. The 64-bit Intel Itanium basically tried to go this path and it seriously failed. And the complexity of this part is not that important because modern process technology can put about 100 million transistors on a single square millimeter.
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  2. @ThePrimeTime the description is still missing the link to computer enchance.
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