3 ms·
What's that about sparc? Or a PA-RISC world, maybe even an AlphaWorld. (Granted, the last two were way less likely than the others)
by formerly_proven 5y ago
What's that about sparc? Or a PA-RISC world, maybe even an AlphaWorld. (Granted, the last two were way less likely than the others)
- Fnoord 5y agoAlpha and PA-RISC died before the smartphone revolution (end 90s vs mid 00s). x86-32 killed them, before AMD64 (x86-64) took off. Laptops were all x86-32/64. There has been an UltraSPARC laptop (one AFAIK), and Apple switched away from POWER because of power inefficiency. Also before the smartphone revolution. Intel was busy with Moblin and PowerTOP back in the 00s. This before iPhone. MIPS and RISC-V also exist. Without ARM it would've happened but slower/later.
- adrian_b 5y agoNone of those 3 even tried to have a product for applications with low cost and low power consumption. The only competition was from Motorola/IBM POWER (and MIPS in some niche products), but neither Motorola nor IBM ever tried to offer low cost products. During 2000 to 2005, I have ported some products with embedded computers from POWER to ARM. The porting was not very easy, because the ARM CPUs had much lower performance, but they were much cheaper, so the conversion was done anyway. The ARM advantage has always been in its business model, which created a lot of competing CPU vendors, willing to give you the best price, not in any technical advantages of its CPU architecture. The NVIDIA acquisition certainly threatens this business model, despite all contrary claims of the NVIDIA management.