Date: Sun, 24 Jun 2001 23:59:45 -0700 From: Jordan Hubbard <jkh@osd.bsdi.com> To: mjacob@feral.com Cc: rbw@myplace.org, freebsd-alpha@FreeBSD.org Subject: Re: Compaq's alpha unit being sold (off-topic) Message-ID: <20010624235945G.jkh@osd.bsdi.com> In-Reply-To: <Pine.BSF.4.21.0106241844250.82639-100000@beppo.feral.com> References: <20010624170916.D26933@malkavian.org> <Pine.BSF.4.21.0106241844250.82639-100000@beppo.feral.com>
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> If this happens and plays out, you can kiss the Open Source movements goodbye > within 5 years. Tsk tsk. As much as I admire the Alpha and its place in time, Matt, I think it's an orphan child currently working its way down through a procession of progressively crueler and less loving foster parents. It will almost certainly end up the way they all finally do - running away and living out its last days on the streets, sleeping in a discarded hardware dumpster behind Fry's and turning tricks for crack. :-) Until the 64 bit architectures with more "mainstream backing" really start appearing in quantity, however, it makes an excellent reference and test platform. Don't get any more emotionally attached to it than that and you'll be fine. As far as the "Intel's taking over the industry" predictions are concerned, I'm certainly not as worried as I was perhaps 4 years ago and I don't see why anyone else should be either. Intel has by no means got things all sewn up to its satisfaction, the fact that AMD has come from way behind to give it serious heartburn on the high-end being a good sign that any real opportunity for an exclusive lock vanished somewhere around the time of the PIII, when things started to seriously slow down there. The P4 hasn't exactly been a sales success story in its own right and the Itanium is by no means a sure bet either. I kinda like AMD's Hammer stuff, but we'll just have to see. Far more interesting to me are the truly interesting non-x86 generation processors which haven't even yet been invented and I suspect a good number of them won't be created by Intel, either. That company has a lot of inertia to fight and going to the next generation of processor architectures is going to involve stuff a lot more innovative than taking the same tired optimization tricks and doubling or tripling them. They've just about run out of room on that approach. - Jordan To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-alpha" in the body of the message
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