By: Doug S (foo.delete@this.bar.bar), November 16, 2014 12:00 am
Room: Moderated Discussions
Brett (ggtgp.delete@this.yahoo.com) on November 15, 2014 2:53 pm wrote:
> Intel killed off it's remaining RISC chip competitors, that is a success, though
> I believe that was going to happen anyway. There is a certain irony that it
> was actually AMD that killed off the RISC chips with a 64 bit design.
Intel didn't intend to do a 64 bit x86 - at all, if they could help it, or one intentionally hamstrung if they were forced, so that Itanium would become the preferred 64 bit solution and they'd have have a legal monopoly.
AMD thwarted that by extending x86 in ways Intel did not want (i.e. more registers, removing a lot of legacy cruft) but they had enough power in the marketplace that Microsoft blessed their 64 bit ISA and told Intel they would not support a second 64 bit x86 ISA.
Things would have been very different had things gone the way Intel intended. Apple would not have switched to Intel, and would probably still use PPC - and might have ended up with a low power PPC core for the iPhone. If they did so, possibly the whole Android ecosystem would have followed them. Or maybe they still use ARM for the iPhone, and they'd be migrating OS X to ARM by now.
> Intel killed off it's remaining RISC chip competitors, that is a success, though
> I believe that was going to happen anyway. There is a certain irony that it
> was actually AMD that killed off the RISC chips with a 64 bit design.
Intel didn't intend to do a 64 bit x86 - at all, if they could help it, or one intentionally hamstrung if they were forced, so that Itanium would become the preferred 64 bit solution and they'd have have a legal monopoly.
AMD thwarted that by extending x86 in ways Intel did not want (i.e. more registers, removing a lot of legacy cruft) but they had enough power in the marketplace that Microsoft blessed their 64 bit ISA and told Intel they would not support a second 64 bit x86 ISA.
Things would have been very different had things gone the way Intel intended. Apple would not have switched to Intel, and would probably still use PPC - and might have ended up with a low power PPC core for the iPhone. If they did so, possibly the whole Android ecosystem would have followed them. Or maybe they still use ARM for the iPhone, and they'd be migrating OS X to ARM by now.