What do you think of Apple now?
ware issues. 
Joined: Jun 2001
Posts: 88,444
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From: Pt. A to Pt. B via VTEC!!
Some major ass kissing going on from Intel!
http://www.powerpage.org/cgi-bin/WebObject...ry?newsID=14616
http://www.powerpage.org/cgi-bin/WebObject...ry?newsID=14616
Joined: Jun 2002
Posts: 42,315
Likes: 45
From: Central Massachusetts
Originally Posted by The Unabageler,May 26 2005, 10:19 AM
the PPC platform is far superior to x86 for a myriad of reasons, the foremost being power dissipation, instruction parallelism (altivec vs mmx/sse), and register management (general vs special). Altivec has a much better design than MMX/SSE, allowing for vector ops and permutations to happen in the same clock cycle. With GCC4 the autovectorization algorithms have been greatly improved, allowing much more software to take advantage of vector processing with less developer effort. For many features in OSX, porting to x86 would result in a big performance hit due to the lack of parallelism available.
fyi, AMDs x86 processors are really RISC chips - they have a translation layer to go from the standard x86 CISC. That's how bad a cpu implementation intel came up with.
I read an interview the other day where the head of Intel was quoted saying that he recommends macs to friends and family members, that wintel is a nasty platform to use.
I can talk all day about PPC, I love the chip. IBM has some very good whitepapers up on the subject.
fyi, AMDs x86 processors are really RISC chips - they have a translation layer to go from the standard x86 CISC. That's how bad a cpu implementation intel came up with.
I read an interview the other day where the head of Intel was quoted saying that he recommends macs to friends and family members, that wintel is a nasty platform to use.
I can talk all day about PPC, I love the chip. IBM has some very good whitepapers up on the subject.
The MC68000 almost displaced the intel 8086 back in the early '80s... It was a much cleaner programming model -- truly 32-bit at the time. Still, because Intel maintained backward compatibility with every successive generation, they dominated.
I hear you though, Josh.
I'm working with Itanium right now, which is Intel's (arguably failed) attempt at a 64-bit architecture that's based on RISC concepts. It's very cool and very interesting, but Intel screwed up by hyping it long before it was fully baked. As a result, I think it's gonna' die -- then again, counting Intel out has never been a smart move. Right now, AMD is really kicking ass in the server space. Of course, we've been here before too when AMD nearly went bankrupt.
So, I can only say this... Backward compatibility with all the warts and ugliness that it entails has been the backbone of Intel's success.
to backward compatibility! 
