🚀 go-pugleaf

In <41oiol$461@steel.interlog.com> daveacg@interlog.com (Dave Glue)
writes: 
>
>lovejoya@ix.netcom.com (Alan Lovejoy) wrote:
>
>
>>One way to catalyze a change from WinDOS to some worthy rival would
be
>>a performance advantage of 4 to 1, price parity, and a reasonable
>>supply of the high-quality apps for the competing OS.
>
>>The PowerPC meets 3 out of the 4 requirements already.  It may
achieve
>>the final one in the post-604/620 generation--about mid 1997.
>
>I wasn't aware Intel had planned to stop development in mid '97.
>Could you please provide us with this press release, or is this more
>ill-informed speculation?

See the press release where the HP/Intel alliance was announced.

Intel's stated ETA for the successor to the P6 is late 98/early
99--assuming they go for the agressive/radical VLIW-inspired option. 
If they go for the conservative, enhanced x86 option, they can probably
hit a late 97 timeframe at best (1995 + 2.5 years dev time per
generation).  

In the first case, they could be giving the PowerPC upto a two year
window where it would be P6 versus the PPC97. And they would face all
the usual problems with migrating from one ISA to another: even if this
CPU has hardware support for executing x86 ops (which of course it
would :-)), how fast would x86 emulation be, and how fast would apps
become available for the new ISA?

In the second case (enhanced x86), the chances that the PPC97/P7
performance ratio will be too high for Intel's comfort is greatly
increased.

Consider this: the P6 is such an expensive chip, it creates a lot of
room for the competition to either undercut the price at the same
performance level, or to overpower it at the same price level--or both.
The price of the P6 is getting close to that of an Alpha at only half
the clock.  The Alpha is considerably faster--with a year and a half
lead.  Suppose one of the next generation PPC's uses Alpha-like
implementation strategies: relatively simple excecution machinery in
exchange for doubled or even tripled clock rates (using existing
process technology).  As the Alpha has demonstrated, this not only
results in chips up to twice as fast as the (RISC!) competition, the
chips can be brought to market a year ahead of the competition.  This
strategy is much less attractive for Intel, because of the added
complexity of the x86 compatibility requirements.  They have less room
for reducing the complexity of the execution machinery.

And Intel is not the only one that can add hardware for x86
compatibility to at least some chips...