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I haven't said that American companies should stop to exist and I wouldn't want to since I'm happily using Intel and AMD processors here, but seriously, what's wrong with another big party to give the customer an additional choice for a microprocessor?

It doesn't even matter to me that it's a Chinese or an American processor, it's just an alternative to the obvious assortment of x86 processors that are on the market.

You are putting words into my fingers that I haven't even uttered. If you knew more about the situation you would know that there is a greater landscape of semiconductor companies that have a right to sell product than your precious Intel or AMD, the latter of which which isn't even second or third on the list of largest semiconductor companies.

It's too bad for them Intel doesn't license the x86 architecture so in order to have a competitive product on the market, they have to resort to licensing another one. Other architectures such MIPS, ARM, PPC and SPARC are being licensed, so what other choice does a starting (fabless) semiconductor company have than to license one of these?

For that matter it is Intel that is dominating the market in an unhealthy way, otherwise you would have a choice of an x86, SPARC, MIPS, PPC, ARM or another implementation for your general computing needs.

I run all of these, but don't make the mistake that I'm waiting for American companies to die or to be destroyed, that's laughable since four of these were invented in America. It's about a return to the healthy situation we had 10 years ago when you had a choice of systems from various vendors before Wintel destroyed that landscape.

I also wish for several of the companies that design the processors to collaborate, as they're already doing to a large extent. After that there is a choice of having completed designs manufactured at several manufacturing plants such as those from IBM, TSMC and UMC. Can you tell me what's wrong with that (it's today's reality anyway)?

Edited 2008-09-10 12:23 UTC

As an American I totally agree. We have been trained in arrogance as a nation that we must be the best or destroy every other competition, that we must be the leader and not the follower. Unfortunately for us the world had changed drastically, some of it due to things put in motion by our own government and now you have other nations who can do it cheaper and better all working together and here we want to be king of the hill or take our ball home. The kicker is that taking the ball home in this instance can gravely affect our already ailing economy if we don;t get our asses in gear.

Actually that's not true. In the world american business has been looked at as being a good model of integrety. In the outsource countries I know of the premium prize jobs are with American companies, followed by german ones with France near the bottom.

I'm not a big fan of them "just adding" a whole bunch of new instructions just to accomodate x86. The point of a good processor design is to keep it simple, not junk it up with debateable instructions. I would have preferred it if they left the original instruction set alone and came up with a very specialized VM type co processor. Or else use the extra silicon space to add more cores and use those for possible on the fly recompilation.

Edited 2008-09-11 05:19 UTC