83
votes
Accepted
Did Windows ever support any hardware architectures other than x86?
Microsoft released Windows NT 3.1 in 1993 as the first purely 32-bit version of Windows.
Windows NT was developed as a multi-architecture operating system. Initially supported different CPU ...
- 17.5k
54
votes
Accepted
Can a 64-bit computer (x86) run a 16-bit OS natively, without emulation?
Yes. 64-bit CPUs (the x86 kind) can run in x86 real mode, and this is what 16-bit application run on.
You have all the limitations of it (640KB memory, 16-bit wide register, etc), but you have a ...
- 1,960
47
votes
Did Windows ever support any hardware architectures other than x86?
As far as I know there are 8 base-architectures (and a number of sub-variants) of which only 2 are still supported today with Windows 10.
Windows 1.0 to 3.11, Windows 95, 98 and Millenium Edition
x86 (...
- 31.5k
21
votes
Did Windows ever support any hardware architectures other than x86?
Windows XP 64bit and Windows Server 2003-2008R2 support the Intel Itanium IA-64 architecture.
- 1,681
15
votes
How to check if a binary requires SSE4 or AVX on Linux
First, decompile your binary:
objdump -d binary > binary.asm
Then find all SSE4 instructions in the assembly file:
awk '/[ \t](mpsadbw|phminposuw|pmulld|pmuldq|dpps|dppd|blendps|blendpd|blendvps|...
- 363
14
votes
Did Windows ever support any hardware architectures other than x86?
Windows Surface tablets released in 2012 used a 32-bit ARM architecture, this specific version was named Windows RT:
It is essentially an edition of Windows 8.x built for the 32-bit ARM ...
- 760
14
votes
Can a 64-bit computer (x86) run a 16-bit OS natively, without emulation?
As CPUs and PCs have evolved, CPU manufacturers have been committed to maintaining backwards compatibility with previous instruction sets and software. You will still find some instructions on modern ...
- 2,784
12
votes
Accepted
How to check if a binary requires SSE4 or AVX on Linux
I banged out a program in Rust that tries to do this. I think it works, although it is undocumented and awfully fragile:
https://github.com/pkgw/elfx86exts
Example usage:
$ cd elfx86exts
$ cargo ...
- 236
12
votes
Accepted
X86 Address Space Controller?
It's all inside the CPU these days, ever since CPUs started integrating the memory controller on-die. The "system agent" built into the CPU's memory hierarchy maps physical addresses to either the ...
- 5,920
7
votes
Performance-impact of Hyper-Threading
It is likely not a measurement error. In fact, this is an eternal debate on the performance of games, since they are usually designed to have the maximum amount of single-core performance. According ...
- 263
7
votes
Why do VirtualBox guest kernels run in ring 1 instead of ring 3?
I got some very helpful answers from the folks at #vbox-dev on freenode as well as other online resources.
It doesn't improve performance. As mentioned in the VirtualBox documentation, guest user ...
- 311
7
votes
Can a 64-bit computer (x86) run a 16-bit OS natively, without emulation?
Yes. Modern x86-64 CPUs are still fully backward-compatible back to even the first generation (8086)
Full backward compatibility is particularly important in computer instruction set architectures, ...
- 27.9k
6
votes
Accepted
Can VirtualBox run operating systems designed for ARM processors?
No. VirtualBox Wiki: Status: Guest OSes and Getting Support for Oracle VM VirtualBox.
But there are Android emulators available e.g. as part of Android Studio.
ARM is fundamentally different from ...
- 9,195
4
votes
How to check if a binary requires SSE4 or AVX on Linux
I gave writing some python utility script based on Jonathan Ben-Avrahams and Kyselejsyrečeks answers a go. Its a crudeish script but gets the job done.
https://gist.github.com/SleepProgger/...
- 141
4
votes
Accepted
Can Intel microcode updates be rolled back?
The microcode update itself can always be rolled back since it is not persistent, although if that update is being made from firmware (i.e. UEFI/BIOS) you might to flash a modified firmware to do it:
...
- 106
4
votes
Accepted
win10 32bit on x86-64
32-bit OS will not check if it's running on a 64-bit processor and cannot benefit from any of the 64-bit architecture features. Neither do/can 32-bit applications.
There is no reason whatsoever to ...
- 10.1k
3
votes
Accepted
How does the mbr transfer its control to the bootloader
As mentioned in the post above, the BIOS simply gives control to the bootloader by executing a jump instruction to 0x7C00.
A non bootable device may have the INT 18 instruction (0xCD 0x18) in its ...
- 1,960
3
votes
Can Intel microcode updates be rolled back?
It depends on how the microcode update is applied. The microcode is patched every time the system boots, either by the motherboard firmware or the OS, so it depends on how easy or difficult it is to ...
- 282
3
votes
Accepted
On Windows (x86), how is the PFN database indexed?
The PFN database is at high-canonical virtual address 0xFFFFFA8000000000. It can be a maximum virtual size 0x57FFFFFFFFF (6TiB) (0x1D5555556 entries of size 0x30 bytes each). This covers 512 TiB (49 ...
- 582
3
votes
Did Windows ever support any hardware architectures other than x86?
The windows NT line has supported various architectures over the years.
MIPS, and Alpha were supported from 3.1 to 4.0 (Alpha actually made it as far as a release candidate for Windows 2000, but it ...
- 6,223
3
votes
Did Windows ever support any hardware architectures other than x86?
Windows 10 IoT Core runs on a 32-bit ARM architectures (IA-32, ARMv7), such as the Raspberry Pi 3. It comes with certain limitations though.
Sources:
Microsoft
Wikipedia
- 141
3
votes
Accepted
How does an x86 processor recover from S2/S3 sleep?
The code at the 0xFFFF0 reset vector for the legacy BIOS can be changed by the OS to be directed to RAM and not flash using Cbo SAD PAM configuration registers in the L3 cache controller accessible ...
- 582
3
votes
How do I install AmigaOS 4.1 on a standard x86 system?
I know this question is over 2 years old, but have you taken a look at AROS? AROS is an Amiga-like OS that runs natively on x86 hardware. There's a distro of AROS called Icaros Desktop which is ...
- 41
3
votes
Accepted
How do I install AmigaOS 4.1 on a standard x86 system?
You can't AmigaOS requires PowerPC processors
A PowerPC microprocessor is required for the most recent release, AmigaOS 4.
Supported hardware
- 2,227
3
votes
Win 10 - 32 bit VM on a win 10 64 bit GPT disk system
You are fine to create the virtual machine. The virtual machine host software, such as VirtualBox, will create a virtual hard disk. This disk is simply a file on the host's disk. The virtual machine ...
- 73.3k
3
votes
Why is there a loss in processor power emulating 32bit programs on a 64bit system?
This all depends on the emulator you are using. But the main point is that an Emulator is using software to do the job of hardware - ie it is not running the assembly code directly on the hardware, ...
- 70.8k
3
votes
Why is there a loss in processor power emulating 32bit programs on a 64bit system?
Emulation requires the creation of a computer in software. This includes a CPU, memory and all the ancillary hardware necessary to make a computer that is as close to actual hardware as possible.
...
- 92.7k
3
votes
Why 32-bit Windows can maximum have 16TB Page File?
Your arithmetic is correct : 2 power 32 gives 4 GB.
However, a file's size is counted in blocks.
If the size of one block is 4 K, which is standard for NTFS, you would have a maximal
size in bytes ...
- 481k
3
votes
Accepted
Why aren't CPU instructions decoded before the program runs?
Because the x86-64 instruction set is well defined and allows backwards compatibility. Using the core instruction set would mean that programs would need to be recompiled for every new CPU generation, ...
- 92.7k
3
votes
How to install Farming Simulator 22 on Raspi with Linux?
There's multiple reasons why this wouldn't work
Looking at the minimum system requirements
Windows 10 64bit
Intel Core i5-3330 or AMD FX-8320 or better
Nvidia Geforce GTX 660, AMD Radeon R7 265 ...
- 129k
Only top scored, non community-wiki answers of a minimum length are eligible