Linked by Thom Holwerda on Tue 25th Mar 2008 16:33 UTC, submitted by irbis
As computers chip continue to decrease in fabrication size, manufacturers such as AMD and Intel are researching new ways to overcome physical barriers. Die size, performance, operating frequency and heat are all major obstacles in the semiconductor industry. Sun Microsystems announced that in partnership with Luxtera, Kotura and Stanford University, it is working on an ambitions project to move data transmissions from electrical signals over copper wires to pulses of light using lasers.
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Member since:
2005-06-30
Well, x86 may be fine for most applications, but virtualisation has always been one of x86's troubles. Although the introduction of hardware support for it helps much, it is not going to be perfect since it was not designed with Popek and Goldberg virtualisation requirements in mind.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Popek_and_Goldberg_virtualization_requ...
Another fact is that the x86 is now a RISC chip core emulating a CISC chip. Why not just produce to a RISC design, instead of wasting cpu cycles on translating them?
Moreover, the sheer size of the mindshare in x86 is distorting the market. A few years before, I heard of peripheral devices using MIPS as their intermediate processor between the raw device/data and the system. Reasons cited for such a decision was cost and ease of development. Personally, having tried a bit of MIPS and x86 assembly, the MIPS architecture is easier to work with. If more resources had been diverted away from x86 to MIPS/SPARC/POWER, Apple would not have to move away from PPC.
Last but not least, it is the trouble of legacy. Although backwards compliance is touted as a feature, it can be a horrible curse. Many old code contain bugs that are next to impossible to eradicate. Also, it helps in maintaining binary blobs -- a reason why Windows 64bit series are seldom sold is because of its reliance on 32bit binary blobs, which means much less drivers. While linux has had much ease in the transition to 64bit, nVidia drivers posed such a problem. In fact, the lack of nVidia drivers for PPC hindered mac to linux OS migrations in the past.
ps: been editing but simply cannot make links that don't show the full url, only the title of document
Edited 2008-03-26 13:24 UTC