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.