The Alpha was a good architecture for the time, but with 2+GHz Pentiums I can't see getting excited about a 64 bit workstation. Especially from Samsung, who to the best of my knowledge has never been a player in the workstation market. Workstations are pretty much gone as a market, Sun seems to be the only people staying afloat, SGI is dead, HP has sold thier soul to Intel. The x86 architecture isn't that great but they got the bucks to continue development and beat other better architectures by shear size of thier warchest. I hate to admit it but good engineering often looses to strong marketing (kinda makes you want to cry), but thats the unfortunate truth. I'm not sure if IA-64 will do that well, I think its going to be a tough transition, Intel will probably be forced to make more generations of x86 and AMD seems to be beating them using a lower clock rate, so it may just be a good time to invest in AMD. Its about time that somre revolutionary architecture comes in a shakes things up, things like StrongARM are a step in the right direction, but not really competive for desktop. Transmeta has great technology, but why buy a simulation when you can afford the real thing, Intel has improved their technology by borrowing from Transmeta so Intel in getting ahead and Transmeta without the huge sums of cash is falling further and further behind.
Speaking of the Gameboy this could be a terrific Gamebody emulator. Surely you could store every gameboy game ever made in 5GB, and have backlighting which the True GB always lacked. If they upgraded to a colour screen and offered low cost downloads, this could be the ultimate portable gaming machine of all time, the screen is a little small, but you could also emulate the Palm on a device like this. People have been waiting ages to get a Apple PDA, probably not the best time to introduce another consumer device, but all that storage to sync home and work machines plus PDA functions like calendar and address/phonebook would be a killer product.
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The Alpha was a good architecture for the time, but with 2+GHz Pentiums I can't see getting excited about a 64 bit workstation. Especially from Samsung, who to the best of my knowledge has never been a player in the workstation market. Workstations are pretty much gone as a market, Sun seems to be the only people staying afloat, SGI is dead, HP has sold thier soul to Intel. The x86 architecture isn't that great but they got the bucks to continue development and beat other better architectures by shear size of thier warchest. I hate to admit it but good engineering often looses to strong marketing (kinda makes you want to cry), but thats the unfortunate truth. I'm not sure if IA-64 will do that well, I think its going to be a tough transition, Intel will probably be forced to make more generations of x86 and AMD seems to be beating them using a lower clock rate, so it may just be a good time to invest in AMD. Its about time that somre revolutionary architecture comes in a shakes things up, things like StrongARM are a step in the right direction, but not really competive for desktop. Transmeta has great technology, but why buy a simulation when you can afford the real thing, Intel has improved their technology by borrowing from Transmeta so Intel in getting ahead and Transmeta without the huge sums of cash is falling further and further behind.
Speaking of the Gameboy this could be a terrific Gamebody emulator. Surely you could store every gameboy game ever made in 5GB, and have backlighting which the True GB always lacked. If they upgraded to a colour screen and offered low cost downloads, this could be the ultimate portable gaming machine of all time, the screen is a little small, but you could also emulate the Palm on a device like this. People have been waiting ages to get a Apple PDA, probably not the best time to introduce another consumer device, but all that storage to sync home and work machines plus PDA functions like calendar and address/phonebook would be a killer product.