On Saturday, November 03, 2012 01:47:40 AM Stan Hoeppner wrote: > Motorola 680x0, DEC Alpha, SGI MIPS, HP PA-RISC, Motorola/IBM PowerPC, > Sun SPARC, Cray Vector, Intel Itanium (irony here).
You missed Moto's 88K which vastly outperformed the 68K. The Moto/Freescale embedded PPC (though clearly not desktop) beats the pants off most of the competition. IBM's Power CPUs still have a strong niche. DEC did make some *very* good ICs. The Alpha was very good, and many of their 100Mb/s ethernet chips are still in use. I've no evidence, but I suspect Intel incorporated a good deal of DEC's technology in their ethernet offerings. The x86 architecture may seem quick, but that's due more to lack of competition. There are other architectures that flat out smoke x86. But they gain no traction because Win doesn't run on them, so they cannot gain from the economies of scale. Foresight, planning, execution and ethics combine to determine the winners and losers in the marketplace. Standards also play a role.
