Part One!
Don’t miss next issue, subscribe on page 16!
Part One!
Don’t miss next issue, subscribe on page 16!
OUR EXPERT
Mike Bedford
only discovered Linux quite late in his computing journey, so learning more about the hardware that gave birth to Linux provided an interesting diversion.
Today’s desktop PC market is dominated by AMD and Intel processors, so there can be
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little doubt over what ISA (instruction set architecture) the majority of Linux users are employing. This, of course, is the x86, and according to a recent survey of Linux gamers conducted by Steam, 73.6% use AMD chips and 29.6% use Intel CPUs. Beyond gamers, ARM also gets a look-in, of course, thanks to the Raspberry Pi and Android deployed on the dizzying array of mobile devices.
Despite this, it would be far short of the mark to consider Linux as restricted to a particular family of hardware, as is the case with Microsoft Windows. By way of contrast, Linux is almost certainly the operating system that has been – and probably still is – available for the widest range of hardware. In our new series on the hardware that made Linux great, we’re going to examine this broad spectrum of hardware. This will take us from one extreme to the other, that’s from the cheapest to the most powerful of computers, and with lots more in between. As a taster of where we’re going, the series will comprise articles on the workstations and servers of the ’80s and ’90s, home computers and supercomputers. And we’ll conclude with an investigation of today’s state-of-play. In this first article, we take a look at the hardware that gave Linux birth. And despite our reference to the vast diversity of Linux hardware, that initial hardware was a PC fitted with an Intel 80386 processor. Bizarrely, therefore, the x86 ISA that dominates the desktop today is where it all started 34 years ago. But that statement rather downplays all those years of x86 development. So, to set the scene for our wide-ranging voyage of discovery over the next few issues, we’ll investigate the early days of the x86 architecture.
This Compaq Deskpro 386 was the first PC to utilise the Intel 80386 32-bit processor.
CREDIT: Wikimedia Commons, Tecnoxarxa, CC0 1.0