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How to Kill x86 and Thread-Level Parallelism
kid inputs: "There's an interesting article discussing how one might go about 'killing' x86. The article details a number of different technological solutions, from a clean 64-bit replacement (Alpha?), to a radically different VLIW approach (Itanium), and an evolutionary solution (Opteron). As is often the case in situations like these, market forces dictate which technologies become entrenched and whether or not they stay that way (VHS vs Beta, anyone?). Another article by the same author covers hardware multi-threading and exploiting thread level parallelism, like Intel's Hyperthreading or IBM's POWER4 with its dual-cores on a die. These types of implementations can really pay off if the software supports it. In the case of servers, most applications tend to be multi-user, and so are parallel in nature."
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A From Litte A system endian!
Rules! x86
Moneyed corporations, non-working 'poor' and criminal prisoners are turning productive citizens into tax-slaves.
Buy Apple :D
There are too opposing opinions in this matter:
1. The mythical man-month: Plan to build one to throw away. You will anyhow.
2. Hack something together. Extend it. It will work fine. (This approach really works excellent in Common Lisp and proves deadly for Perl programs)
It is true that Intel's base instruction set survived the last 18 years quite unchanged. And if you consider the pre-80386-era even longer. It is also true that it is proven and works. But if you ever tried to write an assembler or disassembler for that instruction set, you know that it is a amazingly huge heap of crap.
Intel's IA64 is a nice try, I personally like the approach of trying something new and clean, even though I dislike Intel's business strategies.
Back to the point: It is sometimes really neccessary to reinvent and not to place more and more stones onto an unstable foundation.