Minix 3 vs portability - was Re: Looking for a small fast VAX development machine

Tue Feb 23 08:44:17 CST 2016

On 22 February 2016 at 17:36, Mazzini Alessandro <mazzinia at tin.it> wrote:
> Not to intrude, but apple could also have gone with the serious power cpu,
> thus not "needing" to move to x86. As long as there's enough of a push, sw
> houses release versions for a different architecture... and power is hardly
> a dead end.

The problem is that the mainstream PC market is increasingly going to
portables. Laptops outsell desktops 2 times over now.

POWER chips are still going strong but they're big and run hot taking
lots of power. Apple needed a CPU line that could offer good notebook
chips as well as desktop chips, and POWER (and PowerPC) was only
addressing desktop devices.

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