rarest computers

From: Jochen Kunz <jkunz_at_unixag-kl.fh-kl.de>
Date: Wed Aug 4 03:31:54 2004

On Tue, 3 Aug 2004 14:18:26 -0700 (PDT)
SHAUN RIPLEY <vax3900_at_yahoo.com> wrote:

> In my eyes X86 is not bad at all. Every divert from
> X86 Intel made was a failure. I432, I860, I960,
> Itanium, all failed.
Maybe because everything intel makes is a failure, but only x86 "made
it" because IBM happend to choose it for one of there products by
accident?

BTW: I860, I960 didn't fail. They where used in a wide varity of
embedded applications. I think they never where intended to be used for
general purpose computing.

> Maybe 8051 is an exception.
This is a 8 bit microcontroller, very different from the 32 / 64 bit
CPUs.

> Also CISC won the battle with RISC finally.
No. Todays x86 CPUs are RISC cores with hardware x86-to-RISC
translators. This is an evil hack only to keep the howly cow of backward
compatibility alive. Everything else is RISC for at least 10 years now.
(Well, that is mostly Aplle. All major UNIX vendors switched to RISC in
the mid to late 80's.)

> It might be better for DEC to develop faster VAX than to develop
> Alpha.
VAX is overCISCed and therefore hard to implement. All those addressing
modes that make it hard to design a memory subsystem... Small page
size... It is a 32 bit design also, where you need 64 bit address space
in (today - 10 year) enterprise computing.
-- 
tsch??,
       Jochen
Homepage: http://www.unixag-kl.fh-kl.de/~jkunz/
Received on Wed Aug 04 2004 - 03:31:54 BST

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