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Politics : Formerly About Advanced Micro Devices -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Kevin K. Spurway who wrote (44283)	12/29/1998 6:13:00 PM
From: Tenchusatsu	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 1572677

<If you could, and you could transition x86 to pure RISC gradually in this way, why would we need Merced?> Well, RISC isn't so "pure" these days, especially now that SIMD instructions seem to be the rage. Even the PowerPC, the architecture that was supposed to save us from the CISC burden, isn't "pure" RISC in the strictest sense. And now this RISC archtecture is going to feature AltiVec instructions, further complicating the architecture even if it is better than Katmai New Instructions. As for Merced, I think that Intel could use its hardware x86 translation to transition the whole world away from x86 in the far future. If the appetite for power continues to increase even in the low end, and if AMD continues to improve upon its x86 performance (if it's even possible), then Willamette could be the last x86 core we'll ever see from Intel. But as long as demand continues to fan out between the low and high ends of the spectrum, then x86 will be with us for another ten to twenty years. Tenchusatsu