Re: Is Intel exceptionally unsuccessful as an architecture designer?

On Tue, 24 Sep 2024 13:19:32 -0500, BGB wrote:

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).

But flicker-free updating requires at least two. And even the original
1984/1985 Macintosh could manage two, and the Amiga had its clever
“copper” which split those buffers down to individual scan lines. With the
base-register scheme, you don’t need more than two buffers. Yet I
frequently hear of “triple-buffering” going on, which seems unnecessary to
me.