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Technology Stocks : All About Sun Microsystems
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To: Charles Tutt who wrote (62215)10/27/2004 5:30:34 PM
From: I_Banker  Read Replies (1) of 64865
 
Charles, I am not sure what the right metric is. One possible metric would be FLOPs or GFLOPs if you prefer. Another would be Mhz. Still another would be Spec scores (SpecFP/SpecInt). By all of these measures, x86 has been the faster developing chip.

Why is x86 developing faster than RISC? IMO the answer is two fold:
1) x86 CISC has been evolving into a more RISC like architecture over time as legacy code compatibility has been designed out.

2) The competition and larger market potential have caused more resources/manpower to be deployed to further development.

While the best RISC chips might still hold the absolute performance crown, x86 does and will continue to hold the best performance per dollar crown. Over time x86 will continue to enhance itself by adding features that the RISC chips have until eventually it offers all the features of the RISC chips. Also, don't forget that x86 offers the advantage of having the largest library of software of any chip architecture and this advantage will only increase over time.

Ask yourself this over time, if your an ISV, how many architectures do you want to design your software to run on. This is in fact a problem the Macintosh faces - a lot of software vendors have abandoned the Macintosh market as being too small to be relevant.
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