Back when the '030 was going nose to nose against the '386, the
conventional wisdom was "our architecture is better, but never
underestimate Intel".
At 11:35 PM +0100 7/12/05, Liam Proven wrote:
I fear there may well be an "Intel Inside" logo
or sticker, though, since Intel hand out considerable marketing money
to anyone using this. And it's a good brand - from a standing start in
the late 1990s, Intel went from a completely unknown name outside tech
circles to a household word inside 3yr, due to /massive/ ad spend. It
ended up right up there with Marlboro and Coca-Cola.
I am sad because at this point the x86 architecture is a horrid
anachronism and the Mac sw platform, unlike the PC platforms, is NOT
chock-full of legacy software that was written for the 386 chip (or
written subsequent to that but compiled for the same legacy platform,
for that matter).
I am NOT sad due to any misgivings about Intel. There's no doubt
that they can deliver the bacon. By all rights the early Pentium
should have been the final roar of an architecture whose time had
come and was fast becoming gone. That they have met the frenetic
requests of the installed base and found, not only ever-faster ways
of executing this ancient rickety instruction set, but actually ways
of doing so that have kept the far-simpler PowerPC instruction set on
the outer margins, is downright astonishing.
(Credit there is also due to AMD for pushing Intel to the wall...AMD
has also done some jaw-droppingly amazing things with chips that
execute the same creaky cumbersome legacy instruction set)
It's like waking up to find that VHS vendors have met the challenge
of DVD by releasing a cheap, backwards-compatible pseudo-analog film
format that outperforms DVD. You look at the specs and discover the
modern tape is digital tape, the players have dual heads (the analog
head can play back legacy VHS), it is recorded on the same medium as
the original despite the wastefulness and inappropriateness but a
sophisticated compression-decompression algorithm manages to skrunch
an entire digital movie plus commentary onto that low-grade vinyl
tape medium, and astonishingly overdeveloped chips read and
decompress it fast enough to play back in real time. And an enormous
full-tape-sized buffer retains the entire [EMAIL PROTECTED]@! movie in RAM to make
it possible to select a scene and hop to it without waiting for L O N
G S L O W tape-whirling to take place. And you look at all of this
and say "Wow, incredible kludges! But this is stupid. Sorry, but
really. The DVD is the way to go". But the market goes with the
backwards-compatible faster-performing kludge nonetheless.
I'm still holding out hope that Intel will create for the Mac, or
deploy for the Mac, a 64-bit chip that kicks butt and isn't
encumbered by the x86 instruction set.
--
Allan Hunter
<[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
<http://home.earthlink.net/~ahunter>
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