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It 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
by _ph_ 9y ago
It 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.