Slashdot Mirror
Nvidia Waiting In the Wings In FTC-Intel Dispute
The NY Times has a Bits Blog piece speculating on some of the fallout if the FTC prevails in its anti-competition lawsuit against Intel. The Times picks out two among the 26 remedies proposed by the regulator, and concludes that they add up to Nvidia being able to license x86 technology. This could open up 3-way competition in the market for combined CPU-graphics chips. There is a good deal of circumstantial evidence pointing to the possibility that Nvidia has been working on x86 technology since 2007, including the presence on its employment rolls of more than 70 former Transmeta workers.
IBM gave up?
16-core 4GHz processor modules would like to have a word with you.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/POWER7
There have been quite a few different architectures, all supported by Microsoft and Windows.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PowerPC
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IA64
Even though Microsoft abandon PowerPC long ago (XBox excluded), they still support IA64 to this day.
The biggest problem hasn't really been vendor support, but compatibility. PowerPC held Apple back for the longest time because users had no good solutions for running x86 Windows apps when needed, whereas now they have WINE and native booting. IA64, while having some x86 compatibility, does not have clear enough benefits for consumers, and generally runs existing apps slower.
Ironically enough, AMD pretty much killed IA64 and gave x86 a longer life when they came out with x86-64, thus cutting off Intel's attempts to replace x86. Smart business decision for AMD, but it hampered attempts to replace x86.