🚀 go-pugleaf

In <3vjsjj$6ah@newsbf02.news.aol.com> donrawlins@aol.com (DonRawlins) writes:

>The 601 is a failure.  

I wouldn't say so.  It has the performance of a Pentium.
Is the Pentium a failure, too?

>Apple lost market share and few IBM PPC machines
>were sold outsold of niche workstation markets.  

I don't think that the 601 is to be blamed for this.  Workstations aren't
PC's, hence they don't sell in comparable quantities.  And the first
Power Mac's were multiply handicaped: large parts of the OS (still)
running in emulation, the OS itself not too bright in the first place,
lack of native apps (not surprisingly).

>Some noteworthy
>journalists have even gone so far as to declare the PPC6xx architecture
>"dead".  The most optimistic concede defeat in 1994 but claim the Power
>architecture may still have hope to become mainstream in late 1995 and
>1996; an opinion that is more wishful thinking than prudent judgement.

How much are the journalists' opinions worth?  Most of the time we get
only bullshit from them.
>
>How could that >not< be characterized as a failure?  

Simple: the fastest personal computer today is using a PPC processor.
Whether this computer is a P43 or a PMac is still not clear, however :-)

>And the P6 is looming
>right around the corner with Spec performance pushing through the 200 mark
>on both integer and floating point.  That annhilates the 601 and seriously
>challenges the 604 and 620.

Cut the bull.  Nobody measured the performance of a P6 based system.
Wait until the hard data are available and compare them with the data
of the PPC available at that time, not today.
>
>The 386 instruction set will live long and prosper as a standard.  

Unfortunately.  In fact, almost nobody cares about instruction sets,
the newer architectures being awfully difficult to program for performance
in assembly (the good old days, where all you had to do in order to decide
which coding approach is better was to count the cpu cycles of each
instruction are long gone).  If you have good compilers, you can simply
forget about the instruction set.

>Win95,
>the Pentium, and the P6 are the instruments of Apple's inevitable
>destruction.  Sad - perhaps.  But certainly true.

2 out these 3 instruments of destruction are still in vapour state.
If I were a Mac fan (everybody knows I am not) I wouldn't be very worried
because of Win95 and P6.  The destruction is more likely to come from
Apple than from the competition.  Who killed the Amiga?  Commodore.

Dan
--
Dan Pop
CERN, CN Division
Email: Dan.Pop@mail.cern.ch 
Mail:  CERN - PPE, Bat. 31 R-004, CH-1211 Geneve 23, Switzerland