Re: Is Intel exceptionally unsuccessful as an architecture designer?

On 9/20/2024 4:33 PM, Lawrence D'Oliveiro wrote:

On Fri, 20 Sep 2024 09:55:53 +0200, Terje Mathisen wrote:
 

Lawrence D'Oliveiro wrote:

>
The way I understood to do flicker-free drawing was with just two
buffers -- “double buffering”. And rather than swap the buffer
contents, you just swapped the pointers to them.
>

If you cannot swap the buffers with pointer updates ...

 Surely all the good hardware is/was designed that way, with special
registers pointing to “current buffer” and “back buffer”, with the display
coming from “current buffer” while writes typically go to “back buffer”.
Why would you do it otherwise?

VRAM isn't free, and the older graphics hardware (before the era of 3D acceleration and the like) tended to only have a single framebuffer (except, ironically, for text modes). The framebuffer was generally barely big enough to support the modes the hardware supported, much less extra memory for things like double buffering.
Similarly, hardware supporting arbitrary pointers into DRAM areas wasn't really a thing either.