Why Can't Intel Kill x86?

jfruh writes "As tablets and cell phones become more and more important to the computing landscape, Intel is increasingly having a hard time keeping its chips on the forefront of the industry, with x86 architecture failing to find much success in mobile. The question that arises: Why is Intel so wedded to x86 chips? Well, over the past thirty years, Intel has tried and failed to move away from the x86 architecture on multiple occasions, with each attempt undone by technical, organizational, and short-term market factors."

Comments

Re:A hard time keeping on the forefront?

[GreatDrok]

The funny thing about ARM is that back in the late 80's and early 90's when the first ARM processors were being shipped, they were going out in desktop machines in the form of the Acorn Archimedes. These were astoundingly fast machines in their day, way quicker than any of the x86 boxes of that era. It took years for x86 to reach performance parity, let alone overtake the ARM chips at this time. I remember using an Acorn R540 workstation in 1991 that was running Acorn's UNIX implementation and this machine was capable of emulating an x86 in software and running Windows 3 just fine, as well as running Acorn's own OS. ARM may not be the powerhouse architecture now, but there is nothing about it that prevents it being so, just current implementations. ARM is a really nice design, very extensible and very RISC (Acorn RISC Machines == ARM in case you didn't know) so Intel may very well find itself in trouble this time around. The platforms that are all up and coming are on ARM now, and as demand for more power increases, the chip design can keep up. Its done it before and those ARM workstations were serious boxes. Heck, MS may even take another stab at Windows and do a full job this time but even if it doesn't, so what? Chromebooks, Linux, maybe even OS X at some point in the future, and Windows becomes a has-been. It is already around only 20% of machines that people access the internet from down from 95% back in 2005.