On Tue, Dec 30, 2003 at 10:41:59PM +0000, Wayne Stallwood wrote:
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
Thing is that Sparc is a system that has clones available, (of course very popular with Sun) the Mac has also had clones in the past, and of course PowerPC is used in many different types of machine. When you refer to SGI I presume that you are talking about the Irix/MIPs workstations as SGI also make x86 and other boxen but even then the MIPs arch runs on many different machines . Of course all of the above can run Linux in some form or another (exempting a few flavours of those machines as they can be a bit weird)
It still doesn't change the fact that x86 architecture is a bit sucky and anyhow my sparc box accepts pci cards like anything else as do powermacs (?)etc etc.. It is a shame that hardware makers are sticking with such a poor overall architecture, it would be nice if the other choices had more money spent on them.
Adam