Why is x86 ugly? aka Why is x86 considered inferior when compared to others?

Posted by claws on Stack Overflow See other posts from Stack Overflow or by claws
Published on 2010-04-21T02:14:45Z Indexed on 2010/04/21 2:23 UTC
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Filed under:

assembly

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computer-architecture

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x86

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x86-64

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mips

Hello,

recently I've been reading some SO archives and encountered statements against x86 architecture.

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/2667256/why-do-we-need-different-cpu-architecture-for-server-mini-mainframe-mixed-cor says "PC architecture is a mess, any OS developer would tell you that."

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/82432/is-learning-assembly-language-worth-the-effort says "Realize that the x86 architecture is horrible at best"

http://forums.anandtech.com/showthread.php?t=976577 says "Most colleges teach assembly on something like MIPS because it's much simpler to understand, x86 assembly is really ugly"

and many more comments like

Compared to most architectures, X86 sucks pretty badly.

It's definitely the conventional wisdom that X86 is inferior to MIPS, SPARC, and PowerPC x86 is ugly

I tried searching but didn't find any reasons. I don't find x86 bad probably because this is the only architecture I'm familiar with.

Can someone kindly give me reasons for considering x86 ugly/bad/inferior compared to others.

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