Fast lane computing with new CPUs and OSes

Fast lane computing with new CPUs and OSes

By James O. Scharf

JAKARTA (JP): We've been overdue for some major industry
changes and now it looks like we're going to get them. New
hardware designs are demanding new software interfaces.

While Intel's position as the major supplier of CPUs has
always provided a stabilizing factor in the industry, even Intel
is not immune to outside pressures. Other manufacturers are
proposing newer technologies and design philosophies that will
greatly extend present computer capabilities. As hardware
advances into its next generation, the software that controls it
must also follow suit. Newer, more powerful, operating systems
are starting to emerge, as well as some rather strange alliances.

It all comes down to power. Using five volts, a 66MHz CPU is
running in the thermal red-zone. Notebooks and laptops, using 3.3
volts, can attain the same speeds but run much cooler. Personal
digital assistants (PDAs) are starting to aim at below one volt
operation. With these drastic power cuts, manufacturers are
looking at processor speeds of 275 to 300MHz at safe thermal
levels.

Reduced power and increased speed means that more complexity
can be built into the CPU. ICs that were once external to the CPU
may now come on board, further reducing the cost of the system
unit.

Before reduced power becomes a reality for the desktop PC,
RISC (Reduced Instruction Set Computing) based architectures will
add an effective speed increase of 75 to 100 percent. Of course,
this will be translated into multi-megabytes more application
code that, when combined with the amount of space required for
these new OSes, is going to take a big byte out of your precious
hard disk space. If you're planning a new system purchase, a 1Gb
hard disk is not unrealistic.

The new RISC-based CPUs will use 64-bit data paths, have large
on-chip instruction and data caches and use separate integer,
floating-point and branch-processing units to allow the handling
of two or three instructions at once. Processors that can handle
simultaneous multi-instruction processing are called
"superscalar." If they also split these instructions into many
processing paths or stages, they are called "superpipelined."
Most of the new processors are both.

Fancy hardware

Some of these new "SuperCPUs" are the PowerPC 601, jointly
developed by Apple, IBM and Motorola; the M1, by Cyrix; the
Alpha, by DEC; the Mips R4x00, and HP's PA-RISC. While all this
fancy hardware is going to provide a lot of processing power, the
down-side is that it's going to be hell-on-wheels for software
developers. This is why the OS microcoders are doing some fancy
dancing to provide not only more portable (can be used by many
processors) operating systems by abstracting the OS from the CPU
that runs it, but also to provide applications greater insulation
from the OS.

Exactly how to provide this OS abstraction has split the
manufacturing group into various factions. Microsoft has seen fit
to go its own way with Windows NT and "Chicago," while IBM is
sporting OS/2 and Workplace OS.

If you can't tell the players without a program, you're not
alone. The situation's ridiculous and getting worse. Now we must
contend with code-names as well as triple-digit version numbers!

Some trade magazines are saying that "Chicago" is Microsoft's
code-name for Windows 4.0. Maybe. But, as far as I know the
story: the original code name for Windows 4.0 was "Cairo."
Development began in 1991 under the guiding hand of James
Allchin, former designer of the Banyan Systems "Vines" network.
It could be that some mention was made of it at the unveiling of
Windows 3.1, in April of 1992, at the Windows World conference in
Chicago. Perhaps the media then dubbed it, "Chicago." Other than
that, I am at a loss as to how this switch took place. Any input?

Workplace OS (also known as WPOS) is really OS/2 version 3.0.
(Although IBM isn't calling it that yet.)

Although NT is being touted as more portable than OS/2, it
won't run with less than 16Mb of RAM and needs 28Mb of disk space
for its swap file. Also, there are some DOS and Windows programs
that NT will not run. I doubt that many users really care that
much about portability and NT's 1993 sales of 173,000 copies is
pretty dismal when compared with OS/2's sales of hundreds of
thousands per month.

While "(you name it) for Windows" applications still
proliferate, it seems that the computing public has finally had a
belly-full of Microsoft's promises versus reality. Even after all
the interim editions, Windows 3.0 was released with so many bugs
that it should have been recalled. Windows couldn't even run
multiple DOS sessions until the 386 chip came out; something that
DESKview had been doing for years!

Emulation

When Microsoft started locking software applications into
Windows, and other software developers went along with the scam
just so they could get another few versions of their dead-horse
software on the market, that turned me off on Windows. Microsoft
could have brought NT to the market long before it did but they
didn't want to downplay Windows 3.0.

Although Microsoft and IBM jointly developed OS/2, Workplace
OS has broken the tie-that-binds. The honeymoon is definitely
over. Emulation has left a bad taste in everyone's mouth and the
"politically correct" term to use now is "personality." I liken
this to the AEC's changing of the term "Rads" to "Sunshine
Units."

With the new breed of OSes, everyone is going to emulate
(Oops! I mean, provide "personalities" for) everyone else -- at
least selectively.

NT has personalities for DOS, Windows, Win32, OS/2, POSIX (a
UNIX model), and native NT applications. Workplace OS (WPOS) will
have personalities for DOS, Windows, Win32, OS/2 and AIX (which
will later be called PowerOpen), Solaris, and Taligent.

For those of you who may not be familiar with Win32, it is a
software layer that lets you run applications using the Win32S
subset API on Windows 3.1. Essentially, this allows 32-bit
modules to call routines in 16-bit modules and visa versa. For
you smart-guys: this is called "thunking," a term that you should
get familiar with because you're going to hear it repeatedly.

What about Apple? Some recent surveys claim that Apple sold
more machines than any other manufacturer last year. System 7 is
Apple's only PC operating system but the Mac OS is on its last
legs. Take heart you Mac lovers. Apple and IBM have jointly
produced Taligent; a powerful new OS. Taligent will have
personalities for all the important OSes. Apple plans to fit the
Mac with the new IBM-Motorola PowerPC 615 CPU. This means that
any x86 application will run on the Mac about as fast as on a
66MHz Pentium!

If you've picked up any of the computer magazines lately, you
may wonder what language they've been written in. It seems that
every sentence contains some obscure acronym that, try as you
might, you can't find an explanation for anywhere in the text.
For the next few installments of my column, I'll try to bring you
up to date on many of these as well as give you a little of the
history behind them.