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adrian_byesterday at 3:39 PM2 repliesview on HN

The claim that it was designed for Ada was just marketing hype, like the attempt of today of selling processors "designed for AI".

The concept of iAPX 432 had been finalized before Ada won the Department of Defense competition.

iAPX 432 was designed based on the idea that such an architecture would be more suitable for high level languages, without having at that time Ada or any other specific language in mind.

The iAPX designers thought that the most important feature that would make the processor better suited for high-level languages would be to not allow the direct addressing of memory but to control the memory accesses in such a way that would prevent any accesses outside the intended memory object.

The designers have made many other mistakes, but an important mistake was that the object-based memory-access control that they implemented was far too complex in comparison with what could be implemented efficiently in the available technology. Thus they could not implement everything in one chip and they had to split the CPU in multiple chips, which created additional challenges.

Eventually, the "32-bit" iAPX432 was much slower than the 16-bit 80286, despite the fact that 80286 had also been contaminated by the ideas of 432, so it had a much too complicated memory protection mechanism, which has never been fully used in any relevant commercial product, being replaced by the much simpler paged memory of 80386.

The failure of 432 and the partial failure of 286 (a very large part of the chip implemented features that have never been used in IBM PC/AT and compatibles) are not failures of Ada, but failures of a plan to provide complex memory access protections in hardware, instead of simpler methods based on page access rights and/or comparisons with access limits under software control.

Now there are attempts to move again some parts of the memory access control to hardware, like ARM Cheri, but I do not like them. I prefer simpler methods, like the conditional traps of IBM POWER, which allow a cheaper checking of out-of-bounds accesses without any of the disadvantages of the approaches like Cheri, which need special pointers, which consume resources permanently, not only where they are needed.


Replies

phkampyesterday at 3:59 PM

The other CPU that was designed for Ada succeeded spectaculary:

https://datamuseum.dk/wiki/Rational/R1000s400

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phicohyesterday at 5:06 PM

The 286 worked perfectly fine. If you take a 16-bit unix and you run it on a 286 with enough memory then it runs fine.

Where it went wrong is in two areas: 1) as far as I know the 286 does not correct restart all instruction if they reference a segment that is not present. So swapping doesn't really work as well as people would like.

The big problem however was that in the PC market, 808[68] applications had access to all (at most 640 KB) memory. Compilers (including C compilers) had "far" pointers, etc. that would allow programs to use more than 64 KB memory. There was no easy way to do this in 286 protected mode. Also because a lot of programs where essentially written for CP/M. Microsoft and IBM started working on OS/2 but progress was slow enough that soon the 386 became available.

The 386 of course had the complete 286 architecture, which was also extended to 32-bit. Even when flat memory is used through paging, segments have to be configured.

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