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laurencerowetoday at 8:02 AM1 replyview on HN

i686 was the microarchitecture introduced with the Pentium Pro and then Pentium II.


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chasiltoday at 9:06 AM

If I am correct, the Pentium Pro was the first "out of order" design. It specialized in 32-bit code, and did not handle 16-bit code very well.

The original Pentium I believe introduced a second pipeline that required a compiler to optimize for it to achieve maximum performance.

AMD actually made successful CPUs based on Berkeley RISC, similar to SPARC (they used register windows). The AMD K5 had this RISC CPU at its core. AMD bought NexGen and improved their RISC design for the K6 then Athlon.

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