begin quoting John H. Robinson, IV as of Tue, May 24, 2005 at 02:30:19PM -0700: > Todd Walton wrote: > > On 5/23/05, DJA <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > > > > > o It's not an x86. > > > > As for "It's not an x86", well, can't argue with that. > > Yes you can! Black box it. You can't tell the difference between x86 and > PPC. It is a meaningless distinction. If it were truly meaningless, then it wouldn't matter, and we wouldn't have so many people dancing a jig whenever they hear a rumor that <vendor> might move to x86.
(Remember, x86 is where 1/1 = 0.9999999999991992991398 !) > Things like battery life and effective speed can be explained by lots of > things other than merely CPU. It only becomes important if you are > doing systems level work. If you are doing that, then you are not using > it as a general purpose desktop, but as a developmental platform. > > I understand the general aversion to x86, but I will let you think about > this: The CPU that gives the best bang for the buck is x86 based. PPC > systems are muchmore expensive than a comparable x86 based system. Where the bang is measured in MHz, perhaps. But that's (a) not a fair measure of "bang", and (b) the x86 lagged for a long time in that area and the x86-supporters figured it wasn't an important distinction, so it's not fair (but entirely consistent) _now_ to suddenly consider that important. > Now, this may be because no one makes generic PPC based systems. Only > really Apple makes them, and they control exactly what goes on the > board. This may explain why PPC appears to be a better system. I doubt > that there is much in the PPC that makes it inherently better than x86. Aren't there at least two generic PPC based systems? (Naturally, the web hates me... http://penguinppc.org/ppc64/machines.php and http://penguinppc.org/otherhw/ list a few systems. > It may have some features that are preferable, as the SPARC has features > that are preferable. Both PPC and x86 lack the no-exec-stack bit (AMD64 has it, but that's not 'technically' a pure x86 chip, right?) that the SPARC has. :) > Mass productio of x86 drives down the cost of them. Mass production of PPC systems would drive down those costs. So don't use cost as a sole discriminator. > I'd like a non-x86 system that could run a Free operating system. An > iBook or PowerBook would look really attractive, if it was actually > supported under Linux (the AirPort issue Gregory mentions, and the > firewire issues). Well, Linus has a PPC box now. We'll see what changes. > All things considered, my replacement laptop will likely be x86 based. As far as laptops go, there's x86, PPC, and SPARC, and that's about all I can think of. Are there others? -Stewart "Any ARM laptops in production?" Stremler
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