Author: Dann Corbit
Date: 19:14:55 07/10/03
Go up one level in this thread
On July 10, 2003 at 17:17:14, Tom Kerrigan wrote:
>On July 10, 2003 at 07:11:02, Peter McKenzie wrote:
>
>>Noticed this over at OS news, I've only read the first page but it looks
>>reasonably well written. Probably not at a terribly high level but interesting
>>anyway.
>>
>>http://www.osnews.com/story.php?news_id=3997
>>
>>Hope it doesn't fuel the fires too much....
>>
>>Peter
>
>More or less accurate... Probably one of the most balanced article I've seen
>that addresses RISC vs. x86.
Pure fairy-land, IMO.
Sure, you can make a RISC CPU run like the wind. But what are you going to run
on it, and what software development tools are available for it?
Why is the Itanic sinking? It's not a bad chip. Because it discared 20 years
of development efforts.
Some RISC chips will go into ultra-expensive workstations that will perform
marginally better than some off-the-shelf AMD 64 bit chips at a horrible
price/performance ratio.
The cost of a CPU is a function of:
Development costs/total sales volume + {some marketing goo/misc}.
IOW:
You sell ten thousand chips --> it better have been cheap to design.
You sell ten million chips --> you can spend millions in development.
RISC is totally impractical. Even wonderful designs like the Alpha chip go
nowhere. Since the TRAGIC decision by IBM to choose the Intel chip, there has
been no turning back. The only reason Intel will ever look over their own
shoulder is because they jumped off their own train tracks.
I am sure that they will have an x86 compatible 64 bit CPU once they come to
their senses. They already started to develop one, some time ago.
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