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But the reason that intel is and has been cheap is the scale that their monopoly on the desktop has created. This position has given them a opportunity to devel
by ser9 9y ago
But the reason that intel is and has been cheap is the scale that their monopoly on the desktop has created. This position has given them a opportunity to develop fabs for node sizes that is out of reach for any competitor while keeping a competitive price point. At the moment it seems like Moores law is slowing down, and ARM on mobile has given scale to independent fabs to catch up with intel. So the situation may actually be a bit different this time.
- _ph_ 9y agoIt isn't about the cost of the cpu. Yes Intel eventually won on the market scale. But the real problem was, that you couldn't get a Sparc or PowerPc or whatever on a standard PC motherboard for a reasonable price. From the middle to end of the 90ies, lots of the Linux community would gladly have bought a non-x86 CPU/motherboard combo. The RISC-processors of that time still had an edge over Intel. Even later, with the G5 processor, they could have been competetive, if there had been a CPU/motherboard combo available.
- Annatar 9y agoExactly this! Linus himself wrote that the only reason Linux exists is because a Sun workstation was too expensive.