Dear Tench:
Some of the best software has come out as freeware. Unix is one example, Linux, and Gnu compilers and utilities are others. My company supplies all device drivers and their source code free of charge. We have determined that it sells more of our hardware to do it that way. It simply removes a set of headaches for our customers and they get the option of customizing the drivers the way they want to. I think, it is far better than the "Trust Us" option of proprietory software. I liken it to saying to your customers "do it our way or else". There are some ways to mitigate this, but do you like it when someone tells you that?
As to your point about CISC, AMD and Intel said they match current capabilities of RISC but, Alpha shows that it is not true. Alpha is faster per clock than either Athlon, K6, Tbird, P3, or P4. Besides, they did not claim that the underlying RISC engine is not faster than the x86 side. Matter of fact, Intel in P4 is saying the opposite. Everything after the trace cache is a RISC engine. And many of the bottlenecks are due to the fact that x86 decoding section adds 8 stages and is not as fast as the backend engine. Just think on how much faster P4 is if, once you completely get rid of the x86 decoding section.
Pete |
