4 ms·
x86 is 1980s. POWER is 1990s. MIPS is 1980s. Sparc is 1980s. What would you prefer they use? Itanium? RISC-V?
by messe 6y ago
x86 is 1980s. POWER is 1990s. MIPS is 1980s. Sparc is 1980s.
What would you prefer they use? Itanium? RISC-V?
- xenophonf 6y agoItanium is 2000s. RISC-V is 2010s. Apple could make a great leap forward by adopting the Mill, an ISA so novel that it hasn't even been released yet!
- fnordsensei 6y agoThe Mill: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mill_architecture https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mill_architecture
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- icedchai 6y agoToo bad Alpha died. Those machines were like lightning (for the 90's, anyway.)
- messe 6y agoIIRC even Windows NT could run on Alpha. I wonder if computing would've been different had we gotten a modern 64-bit architecture with very little legacy become commonplace in the 90s. Makes me think of the Tanenbaum quote from 1992: "Of course 5 years from now that will be different, but 5 years from now everyone will be running free GNU on their 200 MIPS, 64M SPARCstation-5".
- icedchai 6y agoYes, Digital Unix, OpenVMS, and Windows NT all ran. You could also run Linux and FreeBSD. I worked at a DEC shop for a while in the late 90's. Alphas were speed demons. This was right before Compaq bought DEC. After that, I think things started going down hill...
- jsjohnst 6y agoThe lead designer of one of the Alpha chips founded PA Semi (which is the company that Apple acquired to start designing their own chips).
- joefourier 6y agox86 is 70s technology: the 8086 came out in 1978, and it is an extension of the 8080 which came out in 1974, itself an extension of the 8008 from 1972. Funny how the modern world runs on the descendants of an overgrown calculator chip.