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Neither PPC nor Alpha are any more conducive to thread-level parallelism than x86. Indeed, in many respects (sane memory ordering model), it's much more conducive to shared-memory parallel software.

Old McDonald had multi-threaded PPC code, eieio.

It stands for Enforce In-order Execution of I/O.

Maintaining the view that loads/stores execute in-order makes writing multithreaded code easier, not harder. You don't have to clutter your code with fence instructions in x86 as you do on some other architectures.

I was going after their push to multi-core when there's plenty of gains to be had one single-core systems. There's an undertone that all they have left is adding cores.

"Neither PPC nor Alpha are any more conducive to thread-level parallelism than x86."

There were other great architectures which had parallelism in hardware, i. e. real CPUs, not just CPU cores. These systems had a better "throughput", but this was many years ago.

- Intel Pentium 4 @ 1700 MHz, 575 int, 593 fp, 0.687 per MHz
- AMD Athlon @ 1333 MHz, 482 int, 414 fp, 0.672 per MHz
- DEC Alpha 21264A @ 833 MHz, 518 int, 590 fp, 1.330 per MHz
- HP PA 8700 @ 750 MHz, 569 int, 526 fp, 1.460 per MHz
- MIPS R14000 @ 500 MHz, 410 int, 436 fp, 1.692 per MHz

(SPEC 2000 INT / FP BASE values)

Of course, this professional equipment was not designed to take any market share in the home computing and entertainment market.

I don't agree with your topic. The "80's" architecture has been rehashed a million times over and I think it's been clearly demonstrated that the x86 we have today is not the same x86 that was in the 80s.

"[...] I think it's been clearly demonstrated that the x86 we have today is not the same x86 that was in the 80s."

Not the same, sure, but it's a successor of the original architecture whose inner parts you can still find. Otherwise, backwards compatibility would not exist the way it does.

Erm, what about the A20, does it still exist? C:/WINA20.386, anyone? :-)