On Tuesday 30 December 2003 21:24, adam@thebowery.co.uk wrote:
Anyhow I figure it is about time to kill off the PC architecture though, it does truely suck at pretty much everything but has the advantage of being cheap bang for buck right now.
While I agree that some aspects of the x86 architecture do suck. It is worthwhile remembering that there is/has been very little to compare it to.
Comparing it to one manufacturer designs like Mac, Sparc or perhaps something from SGI is not really fair. The key strength of the PC is that you have a choice of manufacturers for every single part. Better than that, almost anybody can add a feature or interface and eventually get it accepted as part of the "standard" as long as it stands up to the peer review of what features sell mainboards. Compaq I believe had an i386 in the shops before IBM did !
This is the sole reason that I am sitting in front of a PC rather than a Mac at the moment. I like the fact that no one manufacturer can steer this platform against the wishes of the user community as a whole. Intel start putting DRM bits in their processors, no problem just buy AMD... Via produce a chipset that can not be made to work with Linux, no problem just buy Intel.
Anyway most of the x86 weaknesses could be addressed, but at the price of compatability with legacy apps and hardware as this is one of the architectures strengths it is often considered a price too high.