It's my belief that Alpha64 was canned, too, but I'm not positive.
Alpha, PowerPC, and MIPS all made sense when they were faster than the Intel chips. However, with the speed parity Intel has achieved in the last couple years there is nothing to balance the downside issues, namely (a) the inability to dual boot Windows98, (b) no RISC versions of many third party apps, and (c) the relative difficulty of debugging RISC drivers.
IMO, MSFT is better off having built NT for these chips anyway, just for "proof of concept" with regard to NT being portable to non-Intel chips, plus I believe it forced a more modular base architecture. Still, the added test burden for additional chips is significant, one reason they don't try very hard to support declining chips. |
