That may be the case but that's not the reason. By using only Intel, Dell gets preferential pricing and Intel gets bragging rights. If Dell were to consider AMD it would have to deal with the extra costs of managing two suppliers, accept the price hikes on the Intel parts, and choose where to use each processor in its product lines. So far that makes no sense for Dell to do.
If Dell were to introduce AMD in a portion of just its server line, for example, AMD would make certain to be able to meet demand.
Curiously, the exact IBM sales pitch for the PPC before it was announced was "just as fast as Intel but half the cost". It was not only true that PPC was designed for cheapness but it was explicit in IBM's sales pitch.
Apple must have known it was buying into the only RISC processor line that specifically didn't target better performance than Intel. It's interesting to think how much sooner they would have been compelled to switch had Moto not done the vector instructions for Cisco and extended the life of the design.
Alpha had deep pipelines for its day but not deep by today's standards. I recall the Pentium having 5 and thought the Alpha at that time was 9. If it was 7 then the difference was not so great. I do recall wanting to put one on a PCI controller but it took up nearly the entire PCI slot budget at the time.:(
I never meant to suggest that large caches indicated a design flaw although i clearly said that. The large caches were there for the exact reason you gave.
I never said anything about patents, etc. and trade secrets are not protected! I said that a person owns the thoughts that are inside his head. Is there proof made public that Cutler and/or his team used DEC property in the development of NT without permission?
Recreating what Cutler was working on at DEC is not automatically "theft" and lawsuits are automatic proof of theft either. Companies often settle out of court and that's not automatic proof.
Employees are frequently required to submit to a "no compete" clause. Some argue that that are not enforcable but sometimes an ex-employer will pursue one. One of the big disadvantages of a "trade secret" is that it's easy for them to no longer be secret, like when Cutler leaves DEC for MS.
The i860 sucked as a general purpose processor and was intended as a coprocessor for PC's. It's exception handling was the worst ever divised! Don't cry for the i860, it was the i960 that truly suffered. It was Intel's original plan for 32-bit until they were compelled to do the 386.
Alphas in their day had far deeper pipelines than competitive processors with the specific goal of running at much higher clock rates, much as the P4 is today.
Comparing design specifics for processors of different eras with hugely different transistor counts and process technologies doesn't make a lot of sense to me. If you care to believe the Opteron is the evolution of the Alpha then more power to you.
Don't know that I agree. Binary compatibility counted for a lot and it still does.
If the investment in fabs was the issue then the problem must have been cost, yet IBM with the PPC architecture specifically targetted lower cost with its designs and it was ultimately unsuccessful. IBM has always been competitive with Intel regarding fab technology yet PPC untilmately failed on the desktop. Would the joining of all the other vendors have changed that? I don't think so.
I think you can make an equally strong argument that binary compatibility meant more than performance until such time when the performance difference wasn't great enough. It's not really a marketing success, but rather luck that IBM chose the Intel processor to begin with.
Sadly, PowerPC was NOT a version of IBM's workstation chip. It's initial design was derived from Power but they were not the same. The 601 was a transition design and was not fully a PowerPC processor either.
ACE was formed in 1991. At that time the 386 was dead and the 486 was available at 50MHz. The Pentium was introduced in 1993. It was superscalar and offered integer performance similar to the best RISC processors of that day, certainly faster than RISC from 1988! Such comparisons are silly. Incidently, the first Pentiums were 60 and 66 MHz. It took another cycle and a different pinout before the Pentium went 100 MHz.
As for GUI's, OS/2 1.1 (the first with a GUI) was introduced in 88. Windows/386, the first fully virtual, fully preemptive version of Windows was introduced in 87. Windows 3.0 in 90 and 3.1 in 92. Windows was not the exclusive desktop at the time but it was certainly established. Compelling Windows apps that forced the PC world over to Windows started appearing around 92, not much after the creation of ACE. Word started dominating WP beginning in 92. There was still a lot of DOS use but the PC world was hardly as you describe (slow 286's and 386's).
Memory cost the same for PC's as it did for workstations. If anything, PC's with their compact instruction sets and small footprint OS'es made better use of memory than workstations did. Don't know what your point is there. Workstations had more memory typically but they needed it and their prices reflected it. Business ppl didn't buy workstations.
Claiming that the Athlon was substantially better than the P3 is silly. It had a slight IPC advantage and eventually a clockrate advantage, but the two designs offered similar performance. While the Athlon was introduced in 99, 8 years after ACE (not a good decade), the first of the P3 designs was introduced in 95, only 4 years after ACE.
AMD's Opterons aren't Alpha's and it's a good thing. Alpha's sucked and the P4 looks much more like and Alpha than the Opterons do. DEC had good engineers and contributed nicely to the PC world, most notably with their PCI work, not their processor designs. They gave use PCI bridges and a nice ethernet controller.
If we are comparing experience with these machines, my first PC was an IBM 8088 machine. I started work for a major PC manufacturer in 87. I did OS/2 1.0 and 1.1 work, UNIX systems programming and NT driver development. I did firmware programming work for that company starting in 88. My first machine there was a 10Mhz 286 and I used every type processor and most speed grades since then. I had extensive experience with the 960, Alpha, and PPC 603 in addition to all the Intel x86 processors. I worked some with the i860, the Moto 88K and the Itanium. I'm quite familiar with the history of the processors, OS'es and ACE. You can have your Slackware 486 machine. I got rid of mine long ago and wouldn't be bragging if I was still using one.
SPARC was the oldest, weakest, most primitive processor design at the time. Truly horrible. It was only successful to the extent Sun was successful. Even the dead Moto 88K was better.
haha, Alpha had the grimmest, most threadbare instruction set imaginable. It's strength was it's ferocious clock rates that were enabled by abnormally deep pipelines and instructions that did relatively little (no integer divide!). The characteristics that Alpha had that caused it to be so loved are the same ones that cause the P4 to be so hated; relatively poor IPC, very deep pipelines, very high clockrates, huge caches to cover it's design weaknesses, and excessive power consumption. The love of Alpha was a cult. Yeah it was fast and 64-bit but it was a tremendous power hog for it's generation. No need to love Alpha. No one did but DEC.
BTW, Intel didn't steal anything from Alpha for the x86's. It's owned the team at the time. Cutler didn't steal anything from DEC either. A person owns the knowledge and experience inside his head. I'm sure if there was evidence of theft it would have been dealt with. DEC was a dinosaur that wasn't showing any signs of interest in Cutler's continued work. He left to take up his projects at a company that was interested in pursuing them.
First, when the ACE Consortium was formed Intel was selling 486's. The 486 was not dreadfully slow compared to RISC competition although its floating point lagged. Intel PC's also had far more memory than you suggest and Windows (even OS/2) was well established at that time. The competition for ACE was not 16-bit, single-tasking low performance DOS machines like you say.
Second, Microsoft was a member of ACE and Windows NT was built to run on ACE machines as well as PC's. For those who wonder why NT/2000/XP boots the way it does, the reason is that PC's run special boot code that emulates an ACE bootstrap environment. It could be argued that ACE was the preferred platform for NT and MS internally built ACE workstations as reference platforms. Much of the NT code was developed on them. The ACE machines inside MS had EISA busses and used PC peripherals. ACE even included a spec that allowed ACE machines to use PC expansion cards with modified option ROMS.
It's conceivable that ACE intended the workstations to run a UNIX derivative but I doubt MS saw it that way. It's far more likely, had ACE succeeded, that its main platform would have been Windows. ACE machines, despite their MIPS processors, ran DOS applications! Sorry, ACE wasn't a UNIX workstation, it was a PC replacement that ran MS OS'es in addition to UNIX variants.
It's far more likely that Mac OS would have been phased out entirely since, as you said, Apple would have been a low end line for SGI. SGI was an incredibly arrogant company and it would not have seen Mac OS as offering anything of interest to their current platforms (and that would have been right). If SGI had bought Apple, macs would have run SGI's OS'es until they ceased to be called macs, and of course they'd be out of business entirely today.
PowerPC was not considered the best choice by anyone outside IBM, Moto and Apple. It was clear at the time that ALL other processor alternatives offered superior performance to both Intel and PPC since IBM didn't design PPC to be the fastest processors of the group, it wanted PPC to be speed competitive with Intel at far lower cost. Apple bit on that. The downside of PPC was that Motorola proved just as incompetent carrying the family forward as it was with the 68K. PPC became nothing more than an embedded processor family that Apple had to promote as a desktop processor. The G5 might have changed PPC's fortunes had it's continued development been justifiable.
There's no reason to believe this at all. Adding more of the same level of engineeering expertise doesn't necessarily get you anywhere. Besides, it could be argued that all the processor groups you mentioned produced processors that were better than Intel offered at the time. They simply weren't enough better to make a difference. Odds are that combining the efforts of the competition would have made them all fail even sooner. HP joined Intel for IA64 and look where that got them.
RAID is an "availability" strategy, not a "reliability" one. More components always *reduces* reliability, though making them redundant allows the system to tolerate certain failures and enhances the availability of the data. Glad you understand that so well.
RAID 5 is only attractive in situations where it offers significant cost savings and the performance issues with it are tolerable. With the capacities of hard drives today and the typical size demands of home users it's hard to imagine that RAID 5 is frequently attractive. RAID 5 has relatively slow write times tho that alone probably doesn't disqualify it for home use. Frankly I don't understand why home users want RAID at all.
For most ppl at home, I think a simple large drive or small number of drives that are mirrored are more than adequate. I don't bother with RAID arrays but rather create two volumes and sync them with rsync each night. Doing that eliminates a complex device that you have limited understanding of and, in my experience, isn't always trustworthy. Being a RAID firmware programmer for many years on the job, i'm familiar with the challenges and the quality problems with these products. No thanks. Use a few drives, sync them yourself, and own the entire solution without some trashy part in there trying to do the job for you.
You speak for Apple on this? You think it's not every manufacturer's goal to do the same?
More fans doesn't mean a quieter system. It only means a more failure prone one. Large, slow moving fans are quieter than small, fast ones. Ideally you'd have as few of those as you could. There's a lot of ways to make quiet machines.
PowerMacs are noisy. Other macs are not. Same thing could be said for a lot of PC's. Apple hasn't cornered the market on quiet nor was it their original idea.
"The most creative thing he has done is build an odd sense of customer loyalty where Dell owners believe that their computers are better than other Windows PC's."
What an odd comment to make about Dell when contrasting its business with Apple. That would be the single, defining characteristic of Steve Jobs, not Michael Dell (ignoring the Windows part). Product marketing is something all companies do, and it's far more important to Apple's success than Dell's. Apple banks on its image, whereas Dell banks on execution of it's business model. No one ever speaks of Dell's "reality distortion field" after all. There is no "cult of Dell".
Saying "Dell has no real style, flair, nor innovation" is simply an opinion though popular here at/. "Style, flair, and innovation" are cetainly not central to Dell's business plan. I can tell you that PC manufacturers like Dell don't really care or notice what Apple does. Apple excites nothing beyond it's own customers.
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That may be the case but that's not the reason. By using only Intel, Dell gets preferential pricing and Intel gets bragging rights. If Dell were to consider AMD it would have to deal with the extra costs of managing two suppliers, accept the price hikes on the Intel parts, and choose where to use each processor in its product lines. So far that makes no sense for Dell to do.
If Dell were to introduce AMD in a portion of just its server line, for example, AMD would make certain to be able to meet demand.
"...because IIRC laptop manufacturers, for whatever reason, do their redesigns at the beginning of the year..."
"Roughly, Turion laptops get 3:30 to a comparable Pentium M laptop's 4:00."
What are your sources for these two statements?
Perhaps you should be disappointed in your T43P laptop instead.
Curiously, the exact IBM sales pitch for the PPC before it was announced was "just as fast as Intel but half the cost". It was not only true that PPC was designed for cheapness but it was explicit in IBM's sales pitch.
Apple must have known it was buying into the only RISC processor line that specifically didn't target better performance than Intel. It's interesting to think how much sooner they would have been compelled to switch had Moto not done the vector instructions for Cisco and extended the life of the design.
Alpha had deep pipelines for its day but not deep by today's standards. I recall the Pentium having 5 and thought the Alpha at that time was 9. If it was 7 then the difference was not so great. I do recall wanting to put one on a PCI controller but it took up nearly the entire PCI slot budget at the time. :(
I never meant to suggest that large caches indicated a design flaw although i clearly said that. The large caches were there for the exact reason you gave.
I never said anything about patents, etc. and trade secrets are not protected! I said that a person owns the thoughts that are inside his head. Is there proof made public that Cutler and/or his team used DEC property in the development of NT without permission?
Recreating what Cutler was working on at DEC is not automatically "theft" and lawsuits are automatic proof of theft either. Companies often settle out of court and that's not automatic proof.
Employees are frequently required to submit to a "no compete" clause. Some argue that that are not enforcable but sometimes an ex-employer will pursue one. One of the big disadvantages of a "trade secret" is that it's easy for them to no longer be secret, like when Cutler leaves DEC for MS.
Not sure 7 stages is right, thought it was 9, but I won't argue it. It was deep at the time.
PA-RISC and Power had far more powerful instruction sets than Alpha at the time Alpha was introduced.
The i860 sucked as a general purpose processor and was intended as a coprocessor for PC's. It's exception handling was the worst ever divised! Don't cry for the i860, it was the i960 that truly suffered. It was Intel's original plan for 32-bit until they were compelled to do the 386.
This account of processor history http://www.pcmech.com/show/processors/35/2/ seems to disagree.
486's were not nearly so expensive at that time considering they had discontinued the 386 by 1991.
Alphas in their day had far deeper pipelines than competitive processors with the specific goal of running at much higher clock rates, much as the P4 is today.
Comparing design specifics for processors of different eras with hugely different transistor counts and process technologies doesn't make a lot of sense to me. If you care to believe the Opteron is the evolution of the Alpha then more power to you.
Don't know that I agree. Binary compatibility counted for a lot and it still does.
If the investment in fabs was the issue then the problem must have been cost, yet IBM with the PPC architecture specifically targetted lower cost with its designs and it was ultimately unsuccessful. IBM has always been competitive with Intel regarding fab technology yet PPC untilmately failed on the desktop. Would the joining of all the other vendors have changed that? I don't think so.
I think you can make an equally strong argument that binary compatibility meant more than performance until such time when the performance difference wasn't great enough. It's not really a marketing success, but rather luck that IBM chose the Intel processor to begin with.
Sadly, PowerPC was NOT a version of IBM's workstation chip. It's initial design was derived from Power but they were not the same. The 601 was a transition design and was not fully a PowerPC processor either.
ACE was formed in 1991. At that time the 386 was dead and the 486 was available at 50MHz. The Pentium was introduced in 1993. It was superscalar and offered integer performance similar to the best RISC processors of that day, certainly faster than RISC from 1988! Such comparisons are silly. Incidently, the first Pentiums were 60 and 66 MHz. It took another cycle and a different pinout before the Pentium went 100 MHz.
As for GUI's, OS/2 1.1 (the first with a GUI) was introduced in 88. Windows/386, the first fully virtual, fully preemptive version of Windows was introduced in 87. Windows 3.0 in 90 and 3.1 in 92. Windows was not the exclusive desktop at the time but it was certainly established. Compelling Windows apps that forced the PC world over to Windows started appearing around 92, not much after the creation of ACE. Word started dominating WP beginning in 92. There was still a lot of DOS use but the PC world was hardly as you describe (slow 286's and 386's).
Memory cost the same for PC's as it did for workstations. If anything, PC's with their compact instruction sets and small footprint OS'es made better use of memory than workstations did. Don't know what your point is there. Workstations had more memory typically but they needed it and their prices reflected it. Business ppl didn't buy workstations.
Claiming that the Athlon was substantially better than the P3 is silly. It had a slight IPC advantage and eventually a clockrate advantage, but the two designs offered similar performance. While the Athlon was introduced in 99, 8 years after ACE (not a good decade), the first of the P3 designs was introduced in 95, only 4 years after ACE.
AMD's Opterons aren't Alpha's and it's a good thing. Alpha's sucked and the P4 looks much more like and Alpha than the Opterons do. DEC had good engineers and contributed nicely to the PC world, most notably with their PCI work, not their processor designs. They gave use PCI bridges and a nice ethernet controller.
If we are comparing experience with these machines, my first PC was an IBM 8088 machine. I started work for a major PC manufacturer in 87. I did OS/2 1.0 and 1.1 work, UNIX systems programming and NT driver development. I did firmware programming work for that company starting in 88. My first machine there was a 10Mhz 286 and I used every type processor and most speed grades since then. I had extensive experience with the 960, Alpha, and PPC 603 in addition to all the Intel x86 processors. I worked some with the i860, the Moto 88K and the Itanium. I'm quite familiar with the history of the processors, OS'es and ACE. You can have your Slackware 486 machine. I got rid of mine long ago and wouldn't be bragging if I was still using one.
SPARC was the oldest, weakest, most primitive processor design at the time. Truly horrible. It was only successful to the extent Sun was successful. Even the dead Moto 88K was better.
haha, Alpha had the grimmest, most threadbare instruction set imaginable. It's strength was it's ferocious clock rates that were enabled by abnormally deep pipelines and instructions that did relatively little (no integer divide!). The characteristics that Alpha had that caused it to be so loved are the same ones that cause the P4 to be so hated; relatively poor IPC, very deep pipelines, very high clockrates, huge caches to cover it's design weaknesses, and excessive power consumption. The love of Alpha was a cult. Yeah it was fast and 64-bit but it was a tremendous power hog for it's generation. No need to love Alpha. No one did but DEC.
BTW, Intel didn't steal anything from Alpha for the x86's. It's owned the team at the time. Cutler didn't steal anything from DEC either. A person owns the knowledge and experience inside his head. I'm sure if there was evidence of theft it would have been dealt with. DEC was a dinosaur that wasn't showing any signs of interest in Cutler's continued work. He left to take up his projects at a company that was interested in pursuing them.
First, when the ACE Consortium was formed Intel was selling 486's. The 486 was not dreadfully slow compared to RISC competition although its floating point lagged. Intel PC's also had far more memory than you suggest and Windows (even OS/2) was well established at that time. The competition for ACE was not 16-bit, single-tasking low performance DOS machines like you say.
Second, Microsoft was a member of ACE and Windows NT was built to run on ACE machines as well as PC's. For those who wonder why NT/2000/XP boots the way it does, the reason is that PC's run special boot code that emulates an ACE bootstrap environment. It could be argued that ACE was the preferred platform for NT and MS internally built ACE workstations as reference platforms. Much of the NT code was developed on them. The ACE machines inside MS had EISA busses and used PC peripherals. ACE even included a spec that allowed ACE machines to use PC expansion cards with modified option ROMS.
It's conceivable that ACE intended the workstations to run a UNIX derivative but I doubt MS saw it that way. It's far more likely, had ACE succeeded, that its main platform would have been Windows. ACE machines, despite their MIPS processors, ran DOS applications! Sorry, ACE wasn't a UNIX workstation, it was a PC replacement that ran MS OS'es in addition to UNIX variants.
Now, about ARC---the PowerPC version of ACE...
It's far more likely that Mac OS would have been phased out entirely since, as you said, Apple would have been a low end line for SGI. SGI was an incredibly arrogant company and it would not have seen Mac OS as offering anything of interest to their current platforms (and that would have been right). If SGI had bought Apple, macs would have run SGI's OS'es until they ceased to be called macs, and of course they'd be out of business entirely today.
Almost everyone? Who are you talking about?
PowerPC was not considered the best choice by anyone outside IBM, Moto and Apple. It was clear at the time that ALL other processor alternatives offered superior performance to both Intel and PPC since IBM didn't design PPC to be the fastest processors of the group, it wanted PPC to be speed competitive with Intel at far lower cost. Apple bit on that. The downside of PPC was that Motorola proved just as incompetent carrying the family forward as it was with the 68K. PPC became nothing more than an embedded processor family that Apple had to promote as a desktop processor. The G5 might have changed PPC's fortunes had it's continued development been justifiable.
There's no reason to believe this at all. Adding more of the same level of engineeering expertise doesn't necessarily get you anywhere. Besides, it could be argued that all the processor groups you mentioned produced processors that were better than Intel offered at the time. They simply weren't enough better to make a difference. Odds are that combining the efforts of the competition would have made them all fail even sooner. HP joined Intel for IA64 and look where that got them.
RAID is an "availability" strategy, not a "reliability" one. More components always *reduces* reliability, though making them redundant allows the system to tolerate certain failures and enhances the availability of the data. Glad you understand that so well.
RAID 5 is only attractive in situations where it offers significant cost savings and the performance issues with it are tolerable. With the capacities of hard drives today and the typical size demands of home users it's hard to imagine that RAID 5 is frequently attractive. RAID 5 has relatively slow write times tho that alone probably doesn't disqualify it for home use. Frankly I don't understand why home users want RAID at all.
For most ppl at home, I think a simple large drive or small number of drives that are mirrored are more than adequate. I don't bother with RAID arrays but rather create two volumes and sync them with rsync each night. Doing that eliminates a complex device that you have limited understanding of and, in my experience, isn't always trustworthy. Being a RAID firmware programmer for many years on the job, i'm familiar with the challenges and the quality problems with these products. No thanks. Use a few drives, sync them yourself, and own the entire solution without some trashy part in there trying to do the job for you.
You speak for Apple on this? You think it's not every manufacturer's goal to do the same?
More fans doesn't mean a quieter system. It only means a more failure prone one. Large, slow moving fans are quieter than small, fast ones. Ideally you'd have as few of those as you could. There's a lot of ways to make quiet machines.
PowerMacs are noisy. Other macs are not. Same thing could be said for a lot of PC's. Apple hasn't cornered the market on quiet nor was it their original idea.
mine was a dual 2.5 and it sounded like a jet airplane as soon as you launched safari
The powermac is not quiet. it's the noisiest machine I've ever owned going away. It's quiet only when it's doing nothing.
"The most creative thing he has done is build an odd sense of customer loyalty where Dell owners believe that their computers are better than other Windows PC's."
/. "Style, flair, and innovation" are cetainly not central to Dell's business plan. I can tell you that PC manufacturers like Dell don't really care or notice what Apple does. Apple excites nothing beyond it's own customers.
What an odd comment to make about Dell when contrasting its business with Apple. That would be the single, defining characteristic of Steve Jobs, not Michael Dell (ignoring the Windows part). Product marketing is something all companies do, and it's far more important to Apple's success than Dell's. Apple banks on its image, whereas Dell banks on execution of it's business model. No one ever speaks of Dell's "reality distortion field" after all. There is no "cult of Dell".
Saying "Dell has no real style, flair, nor innovation" is simply an opinion though popular here at