Paul Bone: "x86: An Evolution of Kludges" - MHUG

A sorbet on our journey of regular functional deep-dives, Paul gives us insight into how some of the least-functional abstractions known to man (in the world of computing) came to be - in the form of the current x86 architecture.

This will be an energising and refreshing talk and won't require any existing Haskell knowledge, so please take the opportunity to come along for your first time and meet the rest of our group!

Paul Bone presents:

x86: an evolution of kludges

There's a very good chance that you're reading this on an x86_64. super-scalar, hyper threaded, 64bit, multicore, computer, with SSE, AVX and a bunch of other extensions of the instruction set (if you're using a computer at all, and not a mobile device). If that's the case did you know that as far as CPU compatibility is concerned it'll happily run MSDOS? Yes, a 16bit operating system from 36 years ago!

Intel, AMD and others have achieved this dramatic evolution from
16bit through 32bit to 64bit computing without breaking backward
compatibility, (at least with popular software and features). This
presentation will describe this evolution, kludges and clever innovations.