20 Feb
2012
20 Feb
'12
5:45 a.m.
On Mon, 20 Feb 2012, Dave McGuire wrote:
On Feb 20, 2012, at 12:25 AM, David Griffith
<dgriffi at cs.csubak.edu> wrote:
This reminds me of the depressing trend of a mostly-converged CPU
monoculture. Just about everything is x86/amd64 with the exception of
tablets and phones which often use ARM. What became of MIPS? SGI is just
another Intel server company. HP ditched PA-RISC and Alpha to fart around
with Itanium and otherwise sells Intel. Sun/Oracle is still going with
Sparc, but for how much longer? Oh, and they also sell Intel. Cray
ditched its vector, Alpha, and Sparc designs for AMD. Who did I miss?
Is there any meaningful research going on to produce an alternative to the
Intel/AMD monoculture? ARM servers sound nice, but so far it's vaporware.
--
David Griffith
dgriffi at cs.csubak.edu
A: Because it fouls the order in which people normally read text.
Q: Why is top-posting such a bad thing?
A: Top-posting.
Q: What is the most annoying thing in e-mail?
On Sun, 19 Feb 2012, Jim Brain wrote:
PCs!
I'll bet several people got Intel-branded yachts for making that move. Maybe, the best contemporary definition is
"a current computing system that can natively execute code written in a machine
architecture commercially available before 1970" (or some arbitrary date that covers
the various machines one typically identifies with a mainframe moniker). Note that this
would preclude such Hitachi systems that actually run on Xeon CPUs and emulate the z
Architecture, but I'm sure some wordsmithing could fix that while keeping things like
Hercules emulator from falling into the definition's space.
I see that Unisys is moving their machinery over to using Xeon CPUs. What does that make
the new Unisys machines?