Jed Rothwell wrote:
> There was a tremendous effusion of computer CPU and ALU architecture in > the 1970s and 1980s, as minicomputers and microcomputers competed. Now > there is only Intel. Really? That's odd -- at work we use an awful lot of X86-64 systems. Last I heard that wasn't an Intel part; Intel second sources under license, it but it's AMD's baby. It's a good thing we have AMD, too; the IA64 architecture was kind of an atrocity compared with X86-64, as far as I can tell. The highest power machines in the world are currently microprocessor based, of course, just like the ones on your desktop, but the chips aren't made by Intel. They're made by IBM, and they use the Power instruction set (google "Bluegene"). The front end systems for these monsters either also use Power chips, or they run X86-64 processors, which again, were designed by AMD, not Intel. "There is only Microsoft" would be a far more accurate statement than "There is only Intel" because operating systems aren't commodities, but CPU chips are. Long term, Intel's position is actually quite fragile. (But really, both statements are incorrect.)
