On Thu, Jul 9, 2015 at 4:29 AM, Timothe Litt <[email protected]> wrote: > I agree that IA is the exception - certainly not on its technical > merits, but rather on its inertia. >
Not inertia - economics. It was a classic HBS (Christensen) style economic disruption where the lesser (worse) technology (x86 vs Vax/68K even MIPS) was useful for a different market (PC/DOS later Winders vs VMS/UNIX etc.) but because that market grew so fast it eclipsed establish technologies that were based on technology that people described as "superior." The the new market does care, the "lessor" technology is good enough for their use and its the new use that gives them an economic incentive for that product to take take off. I remind my peers of this fact all the time. Don't get cocky about how "bad" xxx (insert your favorite less technology) is. IMO: Economics is a better predictor that technology superiority. i.e. Alpha would have "won" if that was true :-) So it will be interesting to see if Intel*64 can survive the current "attack" from low-end. Certainly the wins in the mobile market has allowed that processor to make huge gains and is clearly make the economics of ARM interesting. That said, the lasted European ARM HPC system [Mt. Blanc @ BSC] had a very interesting factoid that came out in the last few days. The team at Rolls-Royce was using Mt. Blanc for their work and discovered: "Odroid [ARM] gives ‘cheapest’ run for a single job but Xeon is 27x for 2x the energy cost." Which is what I've been saying locally -> as ARM grows up and becomes more like Intel*64, physics tells us that it pretty hard and the ARM designer have to start doing the same things. i.e. if we all learned anything from PDP-10, PDP-11, Vax, 68K etc.. as architectures move up from the low-end and start becoming attractive and adding features (like vectors), they stop looking as much like their low-end fore-fathers and start becoming more like the systems they replaced. But if they new lessor technology can establish a strong enough base when being a lessor technology does matter, you can disrupt the market. Wintel did to the Workstation/Unix, which did it Vax/VMS; the Mini did to the Mainframe etc... Be interesting to watch and be part of the next shift. Clem
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