Well, by the time you read this, I will be at NCSS, hopefully having lots of fun, but I can’t let my blog fall silent for a whole week, so I have (hopefully) set a scheduled post. If you are reading this, then it was successul. YAY! Now, to get here, I went on a plane. Big Woop. But, this is something that I’m sure not even Ozzyfrog might know about planes. The autopilot runs on the 80386 CPU. Now, unless you were born in the 70’s (or earlier) you probably won’t have a clue what that means. From that clue, you can probably guess that it is not a state-of-the-art, modern processor. Oh no, it is, in fact, a 1986 processor. Somebody out there might remember running there awesome 386 processor, this is it. This is before the days of Pentium (the original, at least some people should remember them).
Don’t lose your faith in planes however, even though a modern CPU is 1000’s of times more powerful, consider this: it has 5 of them. I hear you gasp in shock and awe… indeed, even if one of these dinosaurs remembers it was extincted 65 million years ago, there are still four more to fly your plane. Don’t worry, they are so slow, by the time they realise they are dead, the plane will already have landed safely.
Typically, these processors ran at 16MHz, compared to the 1.6Ghz my laptop processor runs at. That’s 100 times faster. But then again, my laptop processor is based on the Core architecture, so can do 4 calculations per clock. Oh, and it’s dual core. That makes it 800 times faster. Not to mention the improved instruction sets developed since the 386 was released. The 386 does have some things going for it though: it’s been around for nigh on 23 years, so people pretty much know everything there is to know about it. It is also one of the simplest CPUs on the x86 instruction set, which is still used to this day. It supports true virtualisation, and it’s good to know that if one part of the autopilot screws up, it won’t crash the whole computer.
So, next time you board an aeroplane, say thankyou to the folk at Intel for building such a reliable processor. Oh, and what a testament to “old stuff lasts longer”.
Now, this is an unusual situation, since I won’t be able to read, moderate, respond, etc. to any comments until I return, so, by all means, leave a nice message, spam the blog, or start a flame war. I hope you all have a nice time, I am (or will be), so everyone else should too!
