on 4-7-2008 11:06 AM Manuel Tuthill spake the following:
It looks like the Geode is i586 but with cmov functionality.
It strikes me as odd that AMD would build a 586 processor with cmov instructions, but also build a 686 class without that instruction set. Makes me wonder if it was an engineering snafu that was too costly to fix for the quantity they expected to sell.
Wow, that seems very odd. cmov was only part of the i686 instruction set so this still wouldn't work with a native i686 distribution right?
BTW it was VIA not AMD who made the "engineering snafu" on the VIA C3 class chips. Rather than being a "snafu" they interpreted the IA32 specifications a little to literary, the CMOV is an optional instruction, but as fair as I understand if it's optional it shouldn't be used at all (since there is no guarantee that it will be available to all i686 cpu's) but since every other i686 class cpu had the instruction when they were doing GCC it got left.
I totally forgot the timeline. VIA did make these chips long before the AMD buyout.