🚀 go-pugleaf

Joe Ragosta wrote:
> 
> In article <30FD84E9.3F54BC7E@nauplius.rsmas.miami.edu>, Ivan Lima
> <ivan@nauplius.rsmas.miami.edu> wrote:
> 
> > Charles Bouldin wrote:
> > >
> > >
> > > Well, this is certainly the usual agrument. It might even be correct. But,
> > > what if you have a "bad, inelegant, inefficient" design and then you make
> > > and sell so many of them that economies of scale reduce the system price
> > > to the same (or less) than the competing "good, elegant, efficient"
> > > designs that sell in quantities 10 times less than the "bad" design. The
> > > end price can come out the same, or almost the same despite the argument
> > > about transistor count, etc.
> >
> >
> > Agree 100%. When the firsts PowerPCs came out they said they were going
> to wipe out the Pentiums because they (PowerPCs)
> > were "faster" and "cheaper". Look at the situation now. Intel is more
> dominant than ever.
> >
> 
> There's a big difference and 1996/1997 could dramatically change the industry.
> 
> 1. Microsoft is telling everyone to switch to WinNT (some now, some later).
> 
> 2. WinNT runs on many different processors. MS is no longer tied to Intel
> (did you notice how fast Intel announced plans for a P6 which runs 16 bit
> code faster?).
> 
> 3. PPCP machines will run WinNT, OS/2 (maybe), MacOS, BeOS, UNIX, and Linux.
> 
> 4. Byte Magazine tested commercial apps under WinNT on a PPC 604 vs a P6
> and the 604 won handily.
> 
> 5. The 604 chip is considerably less expensive than the P6. Since there
> will be multiple motherboard suppliers for PPCP (3 announced so far), the
> remainder of the machine cost should be in line with x86 hardware. With an
> adequate clone market, PPCP machines will be _at least_ competitive with
> x86 on price.
> 
> There's no doubt about it. The next two years are a major threat to Intel.
> Whether they'll dominate or not remains to be seen--they still have a lot
> of good technology and marketing up their sleeves.
> 

One thing in Intel's favor is that there is a lot of x86 NT software out there
today in he form of Win95 software. this will make it more painless for everyone
to upgrade to the x86 NT camp and not PPC.
Even though W95 hurt Intel's PPro with its 16bit code, it will probably help
it in the longrun with the W95->WinNT migration.