- One-Chip Conundrum
with apple switching over to the x86 family, we need to ask ourselves this question: exactly how unhealthy is a one-chip monoculture for desktop computing? monocultures have never been a good thing in agriculture or genetics, or in society, for that matter. in society, if everyone thinks exactly alike and agrees with everyone else what do you end up with? lemmings. a corporation filled with yes-men is an example of this sort of problem.
until recently, we've always had competitive chip architectures on the desktop. in the earliest days of the desktop revolution, around 1978, a number of chip alternatives emerged, and machines were built around each of them. the z-80, the 8080, the 8085, the 6502, and the 6800 come to mind. over time, this devolved into two chip families for the low-end pc business and a few different chips for high-end unix workstations. until recently it could be argued that the x86, powerpc, sparc, mips, and alpha chips were all in the mix. then came intel's grand announcement that it was sick of the x86 architecture it had invented and was going to change the game by introducing the be-all, end-all chip of chipsthe itanium!
when this chip was announced, years in advance of its actual design and production, there was the most amazing carnival i've ever seen. every company jumped on board and said that this chip is indeed the future, and all these companies said that this would be the chip they would use for sure. this included sun, which said it would move off its own sparc chips and use the itanium.
this dislocation was particularly disastrous for the alpha chip, which was arguably the most powerful chip of its day and would probably still be so if it were not for the itanium bandwagon. anyway, the alpha chip is now dead because of it. but almost all the other chips are dead too, as companies have actually fallen backward in time and have adopted the old x86 architecture in its new suit of multicore screamers with extended instruction sets.
but in a market dominated by picky engineers, how long can this last? and if it doesn't last, would it mean we have the potential for a platform shift?continue reading...