From: torrie@cs.stanford.edu (Evan Torrie)
Subject: Re: RISC Amiga?
Originator: torrie@Xenon.Stanford.EDU
Organization: DSO, Stanford University
Date: 27 Jan 93 02:08:22 GMT

engb@gpu.utcs.utoronto.ca (Ben Eng) writes:

>In <torrie.727909347@Xenon.Stanford.EDU> torrie@cs.stanford.edu (Evan Torrie) writes:

>Maybe you should care.  By not caring, you are saying that it is
>okay that your computer and all of its software could be made
>worthless if the one company who fabs the chip decides to fold,
>or if the one company that controls the designs to the chip
>decides to fold.  

  In spite of the doom-sayers, I don't consider companies like 
DEC, HP, and IBM are going to fold.  Even if they do cut back, it's
not going to be their high-speed RISC divisions which get disbanded
(since in some cases, this is the only division which is showing any
growth). 

>With multi-sourcing you don't have to depend
>on one designer or one fab source providing better technology
>to you in the future (like are stuck with in terms of the 680x0).

  There's also an old saying "Too many cooks spoil the broth".

>Do you see anyone building a better 680x0 besides Motorola?

  Do you see anyone building a better 80x86 besides Intel?  Yes,
NeXGen for example.  Yet the 80x86 meets your criteria of being
single-sourced.

>>>One would figure that market forces would shift towards the
>>>"better" product.

>>  So you're saying that Intel is the "better" product?  In the
>>micro world, it seems that it's who gets there first, rather than
>>who is better.

>"first" may well be one criterion that is used to define "better".
>"Better" is a meaningless language token that has no semantics
>as far as I am concerned without a proper declaration.

  You were the first one to use "better".  What is your declaration
of "better" then?

>>  We'll see how long it is before SPARC rules the roost in the
>>performance league.  I suspect a long time.

>My point is that you don't have to rule the roost in the
>performance league to rule the roost.  You rule the roost by
>being "better".  Obviously, the most popular opinions of
>"better" as defined by the market trends show that absolute
>performance is not the deciding factor.  

  Do they?  If you look at the figures for 1992, it seems that
HP and IBM are making comebacks in the RISC workstation world.
Of course, price is often as important as performance, but with
40MHz SuperSPARCs costing $1800, I don't see many people keen
to put that into their $5000 workstation.

>PS:  Your favouritism towards Alpha smell a little like jumping
>on the old bandwagon (along with a lot of people) rather than
>standing up for principle.  

  Actually, I don't care whether it's Alpha, or PA, or PowerPC, or
SGI/MIPs or SPARC.  I'm just pointing out that Sun, which for a long
time touted performance, now is curiously promoting "service", or "OS
capability", or some other such nebulous concept to disguise the fact
that they're dragging a chain in uniprocessor performance.  At the end
of 1992, the highest-end SPARC processor (SuperSPARC) came in dead
last behind every other major high-end RISC chip in both integer and
floating point speed.
  What really annoys me is that it allows companies like Intel to say
"Look, RISC doesn't have any speed advantage over CISC.  The 486DX2/66
is just as fast as Sun's RISC machines".  The thing is they're RIGHT!, 
but only because the SPARC is so bog-slow.

-- 
------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Evan Torrie.  Stanford University, Class of 199?       torrie@cs.stanford.edu 
Embrace rationalism, reject superstition.           Break away from the past.
"...there is only one thing worse than having marketing people on a project,
 and that is having no marketing people on a project."  - Larry Tesler.
Newsgroups: comp.sys.amiga.advocacy