> extremely far ahead Apple seems to be in terms of CPU power and efficiency RISC finally coming into is own. For the longest time, Intel was able to fend off

> extremely far ahead Apple seems to be in terms of CPU power and efficiency RISC finally coming into is own. For the longest time, Intel was able to fend off much better architectures simply by being a fab generation or two ahead, more clock speed, more transistors, more brute force. Not to belittle the engineers wringing out seemingly impossible performance from the venerable architecture, but the the architectural limitations always mean extra work and extra constraints that have to be worked around. And now that Dennard scaling is dead, Moore's law wheezing and not helping all that much for our mostly serial workloads, they just can't compensate for the architecture any longer, at least not agains a determined, well-funded and technically competent competitor that's not beholden to Wintel. I remember when the Archimedes came out and just offered incredibly better performance than the then prevalent code-museums, 386 and 68K variants, at incredibly lower transistor counts. The 486 and 68040 were able to compete again, but with vastly larger transistor budgets (and presumably power budgets as well, but we didn't look at that back then). Oh, and can we have our Tansputers now? Pretty please, Xmos?