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IBM opens up Power chips, ARM-style, to take on Chipzilla

theregister.co.uk

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Re: IBM opens up Power chips, ARM-style, to take on Chipzilla

#91

Post by scholia »

hollerith wrote: post #85
venomsnake wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Cheap IBM PC clones make possible having a lot more computing devices in every home, which allowed the dot com boom in the late 90's. The clones were possible because IBM due to various business, legal and other stuff could not stamp them down. So we got to the point where computing penetration was fast and high enough for the whole net thing to make sense.

Well, OK, I guess. I just hope people realize that the Internet was the most compelling and most popular way to "get online" even before there were significant numbers of PC clones on the Internet. Specifically, although it was technically possible to give a Windows machine a direct TCP/IP connection to the Internet, if you were using a PC clone to access the internet before July 1993, you were probably using the PC…

Actually, the most popular way for ordinary (non-academic) users to get online was through services such as CompuServe, AOL and Prodigy. The web thing and Windows really took off after the widely-publicized launch of Windows 95, which came shortly after the widely-publicized Netscape IPO.

Re: IBM opens up Power chips, ARM-style, to take on Chipzilla

#92

Post by hollerith »

scholia wrote: post #91
hollerith wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, OK, I guess. I just hope people realize that the Internet was the most compelling and most popular way to "get online" even before there were significant numbers of PC clones on the Internet. Specifically, although it was technically possible to give a Windows machine a direct TCP/IP connection to the Internet, if you were using a PC clone to access the internet before July 1993, you were probably using the PC…

Actually, the most popular way for ordinary (non-academic) users to get online was through services such as CompuServe, AOL and Prodigy. The web thing and Windows really took off after the widely-publicized launch of Windows 95, which came shortly after the widely-publicized Netscape IPO.

The Internet had more non-academic users in July 1993 than CompuServe, AOL or Prodigy. Most of those non-academic users connected "through work" (either at work or by dialing in to a pool of modems maintained by their employer).

If you remove people who connected through work from the definition of ordinary users, then AOL or Compuserve might have had more ordinary users than the Internet, but not vastly more. There were at least a dozen ISPs offering shell-account-style access to the internet in July 1993, Netcom, Best, Panix and The World being big US-based ones.

Re: IBM opens up Power chips, ARM-style, to take on Chipzilla

#93

Post by scholia »

hollerith wrote: post #92
scholia wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Actually, the most popular way for ordinary (non-academic) users to get online was through services such as CompuServe, AOL and Prodigy. The web thing and Windows really took off after the widely-publicized launch of Windows 95, which came shortly after the widely-publicized Netscape IPO.

The Internet had more non-academic users in July 1993 than CompuServe, AOL or Prodigy. Most of those non-academic users connected "through work" (either at work or by dialing in to a pool of modems maintained by their employer). If you remove people who connected through work from the definition of ordinary users, then AOL or Compuserve might have had more ordinary users than the Internet, but not vastly more. There…

Depends how you define "internet users". You're certainly right if you think of email and FTP. However, online services were more widely used by ordinary Americans until they got web access ... and an awful lot of them got their first web access via AOL.

You may recall the huge impact that AOL had when it connected to the web. AOL also bought Netscape, which had been a dominant force in the early commercialization of the web (along with Windows 95), before taking over Time-Warner.

Re: IBM opens up Power chips, ARM-style, to take on Chipzilla

#94

Post by hollerith »

scholia wrote: post #93
hollerith wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The Internet had more non-academic users in July 1993 than CompuServe, AOL or Prodigy. Most of those non-academic users connected "through work" (either at work or by dialing in to a pool of modems maintained by their employer). If you remove people who connected through work from the definition of ordinary users, then AOL or Compuserve might have had more ordinary users than the Internet, but not vastly more. There…

Depends how you define "internet users". You're certainly right if you think of email and FTP. However, online services were more widely used by ordinary Americans until they got web access ... and an awful lot of them got their first web access via AOL. You may recall the huge impact that AOL had when it connected to the web. AOL also bought Netscape, which had been a dominant force in the early commercialization of…

There's a reason I put a date in my sentences. Yes, a lot of Americans got their first web access via AOL, but I would be shocked to learn that it was possible to browse the web via AOL in July 1993. I did not succeed in my attempt just now to find out when it became possible, but consider that AOL did not provide its users with access to Usenet until September 1993.

And consider that that in July 1993 Usenet was still much bigger and more important than the web. The web grew very quickly, but it takes a while to grow from zero users. (To help jog people's memories: Netscape Communications -- as "Mosaic Communications Corporation" -- was not founded till April 1994. Altavista opened to the public in December 1995.)

We've gone very far from the topic of this comment section.

Re: IBM opens up Power chips, ARM-style, to take on Chipzilla

#95

Post by AnthonyMouse »

jevinskie wrote: post #66
AnthonyMouse wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

FWIW: http://www.ebay.com/sch/Desktops-AllInOnes-/171957/i.html?_s... Costs more than the Raspberry Pi though.

Watch out for used G5s that have leaked their coolant.

Just avoid the G5s whatsoever. They're enormous, hot, and very poor value for money because they're the fastest Macs that can run Classic, which means they continue to get bid up by people with legacy software. For the same money you can get a Core 2 Duo which will be superior in every way provided you don't need to run MacOS on it.

Re: IBM opens up Power chips, ARM-style, to take on Chipzilla

#96

Post by Symmetry »

astrodust wrote: post #88
scholia wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Cheap Mips and other RISC chips were supposed to replace all the clunky old x86 style processors, so it's one case where the Innovator's Dilemma effect turned out to be wrong.

Neither RISC nor CISC won in the end. Intel's current generation processors, like most others of similar performance specifications, break down the incoming instruction stream into micro ops ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Micro-operation ), the units of processing that are actually executed. This renders the difference between CISC and RISC a case of semantics. Before this, the idea was that RISC was simpler to imple…

In defence of Intel here, if you look at performance per watt GPUs aren't all that far ahead of Intel. It's mostly that every instruction an modern CPU executes is predicted by a branch predictor, makes it's way through several levels of cache, is run through a reorder buffer and register renaming and a reservation station before finally being executed. And all of that takes energy, though it speeds up the rate at which sequential instructions can be issued by the processor quite a bit.

As to RISC vs CISC, well, it's true that x86 instructions are decoded to micro Ops inside a modern processor but the fact that the instruction was complicated does have a cost even for a modern processor. The act of just decoding four instructions in a clock cycle and transforming them into uOps is quite a bit of work, on the same order as finally executing them if they're simple additions or such. And the uOps that make up an instruction have to be completed all together or else when the processor is interrupted by a page fault or such it will resume in an inconsistent state. And the first time you run through a segment of code you can only run one instruction at a time since figuring out where instruction boundaries are is hard, though you can store the location of those boundaries with just another bit per byte when they're in the L1 instruction cache.

On the other hand, complex variable length instructions mean that you don't need as many bytes to express some piece of code both since you're using less bytes per instruction on average and because complex instructions mean you sometimes use fewer of them.

Of course, Intel is the biggest CPU vendor out there and has correspondingly large and brilliant design teams working hand in hand with the most advanced fabs in the industry.

Now, there are many RISC instruction sets that have taken on x86 before, but they all attacked it from the high end, from upmarket. Doing just the opposite of what ARM is doing now. Will it succeed in dethroning x86 from the low end the way x86 did to it's rivals? Who knows. But I think that previous fights don't tell us much about this one.

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