Don Stanley wrote: > If IBM had not chose to Dumb Down their PC to stop the threat to > their computer line, we would have unimaginable computing capability > in a chips now. > No, not really. IBM has not been involved in the PC business for at least 4 years, now, they sold their name (for the PC line) to a Chinese manufacturer. > The IBM move elevated the least capable chip set to dominance and > crippled the superior chip manufactures. > Oh, we're talking about almost 30 years ago, now. OK, yes, the I86 architecture is an abomination of incomprehensible magnitude. Check out "Virtual DMA Services for Windows" and you will find out there is an entire virtual 8088 IBM PC emulator in all later chips. WHY? So that the old PC games that took over a DOS PC from a floppy and then played tricks with the floppy controller (which used DMA) to verify that the floppy that had specially-formatted bad sectors was an original and not a pirated copy, would run under Windows 3.1! Yikes, what INCREDIBLE baggage to be dragging along.
But, if your argument was true, ARM, SPARC, DEC Alpha and 68K architectures would run RINGS around the Pentium, etc. But, they don't. The problem is Gordon Moore's law has finally expired (long live Gordon Moore!) Notice that CPU speeds (about 3 GHz) have totally flattened out after 3 decades of continuous increase. Speeds have not increased at all in the last 5 years or so. Only some major technical grand slam that completely breaks the current transistor architecture will get us past this wall. Some things can be parallelized, and some can't, so more cores is not the overall solution. We have gone through pretty much two full "nodes" of feature size shrink, but speeds have not gone up, just how many cores can be put on a chip. Fundamental laws of physics have caught up with the relentless shrinking of size and increase of speed. Jon ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Start uncovering the many advantages of virtual appliances and start using them to simplify application deployment and accelerate your shift to cloud computing. http://p.sf.net/sfu/novell-sfdev2dev _______________________________________________ Emc-users mailing list Emc-users@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/emc-users
