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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."
This has been true for decades. Technology wants to evolve from CISC to RISC. The x86 brilliantly hid this by translating CISC to RISC superbly,
But once you lose the x86 tag Intel would just be one of many vendors. The closest thing to competition they have had for x86 has been AMD.
"Computers long ago reached the point where they were fast enough..."
For you, maybe - but not for everyone. I work with people daily who need more computing power, and in fact would benefit even further if processors were faster even than they are today. "Fast enough" is a fallacy - there is always, and will always be, room for improvement. Folks doing media editing, 3D animation, scientific research, financial calculations, and a whole host of other things need more power from their computers - not to move away to a less capable platform.
Heck, even in games this is apparent. A lot of new games simply will not play well on processors from 2006 - that is seven years ago now, before quad-core processors were widely available! So please, don't take your one case and assume that means no one else has different needs for their computers.
William George
And that's really why the story question is misguided. The underlying architecture has nothing to do with the ISA; Intel can build whatever they want and throw an x86 decoder frontend on it and have a suitable x86 CPU. Killing the x86 ISA doesn't do anything for Intel or their customers.
Intel is still the major manufacturer of laptop, desktop, workstation and server chips... What if they're not the main provider for cheap toys?
If you weren't around for IBM's reaction to the arrival of minicomputers, or for Digital Equipment's reaction to microcomputers, you wouldn't understand why I'm cleaning up the coffee I just spewed all over my desk. Let's just say that last sentence isn't exactly new.
Lacking <sarcasm> tags,
The Core-2-Quad 6600 (q6600) was released in Jan 2007. The chip is such a workhorse that it will run any of the new games out their. The limiter is the video card capabilities.
David Packard (of HP) used to say, "We're trying to put ourselves out of business every six months. Because if we don't, someone else will."
Back then, they came out with the LaserJet and DeskJet series and made tons of money. And every new printer was WAY better than the last one. But then he died and they decided that they should lock their ink cartridges and sue refillers instead of innovating. Now, companies like Brother and Canon are eating their lunch, by...wait for it...putting themselves out of business every 6 months...
Peter predicted that you would "deliberately forget" creation 2000 years ago...
Yes. DEC Alpha, which originally ran Slashdot on a 166 mHZ Multia, and the great MIPS III 64's: R4000 and descendants.
"Flyin' in just a sweet place,
Never been known to fail..."
Seriously? You think the BSOD thing is because of the CPU architecture, versus the operating system architecture?
Please provide more information. I think you're getting it wrong here.
The alpha architecture was nice, but it was expensive, niche and single-vendor. It had floating point performance the smoked the i387/i487 of the day. It had 64 bit internal bits far before the PC architecture was 64 bits. But none of those prevent BSOD.
BSOD is because of poor driver writing, poor system architecture and crappy hardware quality. Not because of the CPU architecture.