20 Feb
2012
20 Feb
'12
12:45 p.m.
On Feb 20, 2012, at 0:45, 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?
MIPS is still fairly common in embedded devices, especially routers. PowerPC is also a
fairly common embedded device, mostly in telecom (but certainly not exclusively). As ARMs
become more powerful and Moore's law makes performance per MHz less relevant, ARM is
starting to take those slots, too, though.
I actually like ARM (certainly a lot more than 8086), but yes, the whole
"monoculture" aspect Is worrying.
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.
I mean, I guess they sound nice, but once you make an ARM as performance-oriented as
modern x86 processors, you lose most of the power benefits. It's an architecture that
was designed primarily around simplicity in silicon rather than raw speed, and that's
carried through even to the most advanced modern implementations; for example, IIRC,
it's only recently that they've had branch prediction hardware.
- Dave