Intel Gets PA-RISC Engineers

Doctor_D writes "Well it looks like Intel has done it again. They have absorbed more processor engineers, this time from HP. Alpha is gone, PA-RISC is going, what's going to be left? MIPS? SPARC? AMD? Crusoe? "

Comments

Scott McNealy was right

[Ami Ganguli]

I remember seeing McNealy speak some years ago at a tradeshow (I don't remember exactly when or where). He explained some of the economics of CPU design and predicted that in a few years there would be only three major architectures: SPARC (Sun), PowerPC (IBM), and Intel. It's kind of creepy how his predictions have come true.

His arguement was based on financial analysis of how much it cost to develop and maintain a competitive architecture, and how much revenue each of the big players could expect from their designs. HP was doing comparitively well at the time, but McNealy figured they were using revenue from printers to subsidize their chip business, and that couldn't go on forever.

Alpha was still a viable competitor at that point, but again it comes down to volume. You might get a team of crack engineers together to design a beautiful CPU, but if you don't get the volume (or high margins like IBM mainframes) then you can't afford to keep the architecture competitive.