Meet ARM1, grandfather of today's mobe, tablet CPUs – watch it crunch code live in a browser

Re: "...[Acorn] imploded..."

>If there was any doubt where you were coming from, it's clear now. And it's not a good place.

Please do forget to mention where that place actually is.

>Lots of people don't have to *imagine* not using "hideous x86 box grunt

>work of compiling all the tools and code for the target".

Because they don't do work in a field that requires them to do lots of compiling, data processing etc.

But they'll consume content that has been processed by machines many times more powerful than their "mobile" device multiple times a day.

>There are still people using stuff other than x86 too, but the

On the desktop? Are there any desktop machines shipping in volume that aren't x86? The only ones I can think of are chromebooks and they aren't exactly winning any ass kicking competitions.

>typical IT department's dependence on

IT departments - The be all and end all of people that think that their job fixing printers is "working in high technology"

>Unix, VMS, etc, as there used to be.

Unix doesn't run on x86? You better tell that to all the Unix vendors that ported their breed of Unix to x86 as soon as they realised fast commodity priced x86 hardware was going to ruin their RISC party.

>If x86 is so brilliant in general, why is it near invisible outside the IT department?

Who said it's so brilliant? All I'm saying is it's not the ISIS of instruction sets and it's not like ARM is some amazing super technology sent from heaven to save us all. It's horses for courses.

If you want your desktop machine to be limited to performance levels of 5 years ago and only able to access a quarter of the RAM that my core i7 setup does knock yourself out.. but I'll be keeping my commodity machine with 32GB of RAM kthnxbye.

And not exactly invisible outside of the IT department unless your job fixing printers involves printers attached to machines that consume multiple rooms:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Supercomputer#/media/File:Processor_families_in_TOP500_supercomputers.svg

Re: "...[Acorn] imploded..."

Just to add.

>x86 is a prime example of how its not always the best product winning the market

Few product lines ever have had a stronger network effect which is why it won the day and carried Intel to be one of the 30 biggest companies in the world but ironically may end up dragging it down to its doom as well.

Re: "...[Acorn] imploded..."

"nobody hates x86 more than Intel does"

Citation welcome. The story isn't quite as simple as that.

In the mid/late 1990s patent wars between Intel and DEC, Intel could have ended up with ownership of the Alpha architecture if they'd wanted to, or at least as an Alpha licencee (like Samsung were). As owners of Alpha they could also have had one implementation that was almost an SoC before most industry folk knew SoCs existed (the 21066). In addition Intel could also have ended up with ownership of DEC's StrongARM designs and designers (which they did) and carried on with them (which they didn't, not in any serious way).

Intel HQ chose to carry on their own sweet way with IA64 ("because 64bit x86 is impossible and IA64 is the answer"). Sadly high end DEC systems (by then Compaq systems) were among those drinking the IA64 KoolAid, and the Alpha fell by the wayside, despite very prescient stuff like this slightly-techy 1999 whitepaper from DEC's Alpha people explaining why IA64 would fail:

http://www.cs.trinity.edu/~mlewis/CSCI3294-F01/Papers/alpha_ia64.pdf

Then when AMD showed that x86-64 was not only possible but practical and popular, Intel HQ finally realised that "industry standard 64-bit" meant AMD64 not IA64 (and not Alpha or MIPS or Power or SPARC). But the IA64 lived on alongside x86-64 for a while, even though everyone with a clue knew IA64 was going nowhere.

Alongside all that, Intel HQ chose not to retain and enhance the StrongARM designs (and people) they did end up with in 1997, they chose to sell them off to Marvell and carry on down the x86 road.

If those are signs of hating x86, you could have fooled me.

Btw, much of this "x86 vs the rest" stuff could be, and was, written ten years or so ago. Ten years after, Intel still haven't got with the SoC programme (there's more to this than "mobile", as in mobile phones/tablets/etc).

E.g.

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2006/06/27/intel_sells_xscale/

"Intel is to flog off its XScale [nee StrongARM] processor operation, the chip giant said today. The move paves the way for it to push low-power x86 CPUs at mobile phone and PDA makers. The buyer is comms chip company Marvell Technology Group, which is paying $600m cash for the product line and taking on "certain liabilities"."

and (the following day)

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2006/06/28/intel_mobile_failure/

"Intel's name looks forever to be associated with the PC, now that it's ended a nine year dalliance with the phone business. The firesale of its 1,400 strong XScale processor division, and the write down of its cellular investments, means that Intel has passed up the chance to play in the largest volume chip market of them all. There are 2bn mobile phones in the world, and in many emerging markets the phone is the only computing device likely to achieve ubiquity."

Intel: the x86 company, now and always.