This ^^. The "OMG... HORROR" in this article about the mere fact of x86 usage is deeply silly. The stuff about C64 and so on at the end... there's just no redeeming this mess. The mods should nuke it.
So, I just want to throw out there that your arstechnica uarch articles are one of the things that pushed me into computer engineering rather than straight CS. And Inside The Machine I consider to be up there with Patterson & Hennessy. Thanks for all of that! : )
Hey, same here! Your articles are what inspired me to go into chip design /computer engineering. Still have my signed copy of Inside the Machine on my bookshelf :)
Is it? It's 3 pages of overly emphatic text revealing that an Intel chip is based around an x86 CPU. By the author's own admission is their conclusion: "Nothing really, I just found this funny and wanted to share".
Also I'm a bit baffled that they wrote a tool to measure the entropy of the machine code, tried hand-disassembling and considered that it might have been an encrypted binary format before guessing that an Intel chip could be running an Intel CPU. But they did try "EVERY POSSIBLE RISC ARCHITECTURE [they] KNOW" because apparently nobody ever used CISC on embedded devices. Nobody tell him about the GameBoy.
Of course I'm a bit harsh, it's easy to mock in hindsight but it's still not very interesting technically.
obviously you're not into baseband reversing, otherwise you would have known that for the past 10+ years, basebands were almost always RISC cpu and almost always ARM...
moreover, all previous iterations of Intel basebands were custom ARM cores based around Infineon IP acquired by Intel to be competitive in the baseband market...you did not even read my document, because I said this about the old baseband version
moreover, by the nature of baseband itself, it requires a CPU capable of real-time or near real-time processing, as a matter of fact other vendors are using Cortex-R CPU, which is an ARM cpu made for real-time os, giving you predictable timings, especially interrupt processing and memory access
for example, Cortex-R gives you a special kind of memory, called TCM (Tightly-Coupled Memory) memory, which gives you predictable memory access timings, something that you cannot obtain with a simple cache
by the way, Cortex-R is also used in WiFi chipsets, because the type of processing required is very similar (check the excellent writeup done by Google's Project Zero about this)
so yes, it is interesting to see how Intel managed to implement this kind of features in an x86 CPU, which was never designed for such kind of requirements
I suggest you take a look at the References in my document, they might provide some useful information on the matter
of course if you're not interested in baseband reversing, then I guess you're right, it's not technically interesting material
Sorry, having learned on VAX and 68K, followed by several years of ARM, I will never lose my instinctive revulsion to the creeping unkillable multitentacled horror that is x86. :)