Geeks of a certain age will remember the great RISC x CISC wars. Back in 1990 I, like everyone else, was convinced that reduced instruction set computers would win and complex instruction set chips such as 486 and Pentium were toast. For example, NeXTStep ran on Intel and Motorola oldstyle CISC chips, and on HP and Sparc wave-of-the-future RISC ones. I was wrong.
All chipmakers except for Intel changed their microprocessor architectures to RISC, but Intel still won, thanks to economies of scale and good engineering incorporating RISC ideas. HPPA, PowerPC, and Sparc are gone or irrelevant. Even Apple was brought back to CISC by the low power and multicore designs coming out of Intel's Haifa shop. The only surviving CISC architecture of any importance is x86, but that is precisely what my computer has inside, and yours.
Unless of course you are reading this in an iPad or iPhone. Then your mobile device runs iOS, a direct descendant of NeXTStep, and has a RISC processor with the ARM architecture (chances that someone would read a blog on other mobile devices are so slim that it's not worth checking what kind of processor they use. ARM RISC also, probably, or lookalike). And where are the technological advances and the profits, in desktop computers or mobiles?
It seems that RISC won after all. As did NeXT. Just took longer than expected.
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Obrigado pela visita! abbracci!
I think its just a technology change problem, just like it was in VHS x BETAMAX. As you can see in http://www.eejournal.com/archives/articles/20110309-itanium/ even Intel lost in this RISC x CISC competition.
Saying that RISC architechtures like PowerPC is irrelevant is not true, they are not used on desktop/laptop PCs and servers, but on embedded systems like satellites and military products, they are used.
What happened with ARM and NeXT is that they found another niche to stabilish themselves as a de facto standard.
Probably, desktop computers will never change their processor achitecture, just because of the legacy it has.
Not sure I agree. Intel is doing fine. They can afford one dud such as Itanium because their main product sells well.
On the other hand, I think desktop computers are becoming an small niche. Mobile is where the action is. And here RISC rules. ARM, not PPC.
I believe desktop computers will continue to exist, although maybe not in the way as we know it today. Full-sized keyboards and hi-res monitors will continue to exist, although the computer itself will not remain the same.
But x86 will soon (maybe 10 years) disappear. There are already some laptops coming out with ARM processors. And even Microsoft announced Windows 8 will support ARM. If emulators are available, (like in the early Intel Macs' MAC OS X) I believe the transition might not be noticed by most users.
They go on. I am having fun writing some code on my iMac. But the action and the profits have moved to the handhelds and to RISC.
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