4 Jun
2013
4 Jun
'13
4:41 a.m.
On Jun 3, 2013, at 22:25, Liam Proven <lproven at gmail.com> wrote:
The Dreamcast was a Hitachi SuperH, the GameCube was a PowerPC.
Not that any of this invalidates your other points, but for pedantry's
sake... :-)
- Dave
None of the
architectures you've listed has ever tried
(at least not that I recall) to take over the low-end desktop market.
I beg to differ.
The Sony PS2, Sega Dreamcast and NEC Gamecube generation of consoles
were all (I think) based on derivatives of MIPS. They shipped tens of
millions of units, maybe hundreds of millions between them. And it didn't work. Apple led the exodus, jumping
to its arch-enemy
Intel, soon dropping PPC code compatibility and offering a free,
built-in tool to dual-boot with Windows, while there is a /choice/ of
free hypervisors to run Windows under Mac OS X.
Apple did this largely because Motorola and IBM weren't interested in
developing the PPC farther for the desktop market. Motorola was
focused more on the embedded space (where they've done well,
spun off as Freescale) while IBM mainly went for the high end
server space with POWER.
Meantime, MIPS is coming back, amazingly, as an
even-lower-power-than-ARM offering from Imagination, the company that
makes PowerVR GPUs.
There are also some very high power MIPS64 chips from other vendors
which are primarily used in networking equipment.