CPU monoculture

-----Original Message----- From: cctalk-bounces at classiccmp.org [mailto:cctalk-bounces at classiccmp.org] On Behalf Of David Griffith Sent: 20 February 2012 05:46 To: General Discussion: On-Topic and Off-Topic Posts Subject: CPU monoculture On Mon, 20 Feb 2012, Dave McGuire wrote: <dgriffi at cs.csubak.edu> wrote: 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. Xeon CPUs. What does that make the new Unisys machines? making that move. 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?