Analysis: x86 Vs PPC
Linked by Nicholas Blachford on Wed 9th Jul 2003 16:43 UTC
Talk, Rumors, X Versus Y This article started life when I was asked to write a comparison of x86 and PowerPC CPUs for work. We produce PowerPC based systems and are often asked why we use PowerPC CPUs instead of x86 so a comparison is rather useful. While I have had an interest in CPUs for quite some time but I have never explored this issue in any detail so writing the document proved an interesting exercise. I thought my conclusions would be of interest to OSNews readers so I've done more research and written this new, rather more detailed article. This article is concerned with the technical differences between the families not the market differences.
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epic architecture please?
by steve on Wed 9th Jul 2003 18:10 UTC

After having finishing the article, it does seem to miss some points, but still overall, the article is good and one of the better reads I've had on Osnews in a long, long time.

Thinking about the x86 strategy in terms of marketing is a pure wonder--however, if Intel had actually focused on creating a better architecture rather than one that had many parameters to tweak such as mhz, cache size, bus speed, hyperthreading, etc where some marketing guru could overstate again and again, where would we be today?
Don't get me wrong, the x86 is a true piece of engineering excellence, taking something that's not that great and inefficient and making it good enough to satisfy the current user base to fanatical points where they berate powerpc users on a common basis. But what if intel was less marketing driven, could they have come up with something better than x86. I guess that's where the alpha and epic architectures fall in. Makes me wonder about buying anything x86 in the future (i.e. x86-64).

Somebody please do an architecture overview on madison.