x86 Evolution Still Driving the Revolution

An anonymous reader writes "The x86 instruction set may be ancient, in technology terms, but that doesn't mean it's not exciting or innovative. In fact the future of x86 is looking brighter than it has in years. Geek.com has an article pointing out how at 30 years old x86 is still a moving force in technological advancement and, despite calls for change and numerous alternatives, it will still be the technology that gets us where we want to go. Quoting: 'As far as the world of the x86 goes, the future is very bright. There are so many new markets that 45nm products enable. Intel has really nailed the future with this goal. And in the future when they produce 32nm, and underclock their existing processors to allow the extremely low power requirements of cell phones and other items, then the x86 will be the power-house for our home computers, our notebooks, our cell phones, our MIDs and other unrealized devices today.'"

Comments

Baloney

[LizardKing]

The article appears to be written from the perspective of someone who knows fuck all about the embedded market. The majority of embedded products that have something more sophisticated than an 8bit processor are using Motorola M68K, ARM or MIPS derivatives. That's likely to stay that way, as x86 processors tend to be large, comparatively power hungry and focused on high clock speeds - especially the ones from Intel and AMD. In fact, the only vaguely embedded device I've come across with an x86 chip was using a 486 clone (from Cyrix I think).

Re:To rehash the same old story

[mikael]

Ars Technica has a good article on this debate

RISC vs. CISC - the Post-RISC Era, and Bibliography

In defence of RISC

The majority of software written for any chip is compiled by a relatively small number of compilers, and those compilers tend to use pretty much the same subset of instructions. The UNIX portable C compiler for example used less than 30% of the Motorola 68000 instruction set.