From: Mike A. Harris (mharrisredhat.com)
Date: Mon May 26 2003 - 03:33:07 CDT

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On Mon, 26 May 2003, Stefan Reinauer wrote:

>* Maurice Hilarius <mauriceharddata.com> [030525 16:31]:
>> With regards to your message at 07:52 AM 5/25/03, Bryan J. Smith. Where you
>> stated:
>> >Alpha was _the_ RISC architecture. Digital didn't invent RISC, they
>> >just made it anal (and better).
>>
>>
>> Right. But they fell into a market trap. And so did Intel with Itanium.
>> It does not matter how good it is.
>
>If it did, both mentioned CPUs were really unlike one another.
>
>> If there is no software for it.
>>
>> 32 bit X86 compatibility is the key.
>
>I don't think so. PPC and Power4 cpus don't come with ia32 compatibility
>and are still kind of successful.

PPC is somewhat of an exception to the "everything must be x86
compatible rule", because aside from x86, Macintosh is the second
most commoditized consumer CPU. PPC enjoys it's market segment
by Macintosh legacy instead of x86 legacy, but the concept is the
same, just the actual volume is much smaller. Macs are
themselves a niche as well, just a larger niche than average.

I don't believe the market has room for 3 commodity CPU families
which are binarily incompatible with each other. In the 1980s
yes, but not in the 2000s. ;o)

--
Mike A. Harris ftp://people.redhat.com/mharris
OS Systems Engineer - XFree86 maintainer - Red Hat

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