Judge a man by his questions rather than his answers
|
|
|
Intel’s x86 microprocessor wins INQUIRER readers’ vote
CHIPMAKER Intel's x86 architecture has beaten its rivals by far to become The INQUIRER readers' favourite microprocessor architecture of the past four decades.
In our latest poll we asked, "It was the 40th anniversary of the Intel 4004 chip last week. What is your favourite microprocessor architecture of the last four decades?"
When it launched in November 1971, The Intel 4004 was the first commercially available microprocessor, combining all the components of a processor onto a single chip for the first time.
And it wasn't too shocking when you voted Intel's server and desktop giant, the X86 architecture the winner, with 53 per cent of the vote.
In second place was ARM, which was originally conceived by Acorn Computers for use in its personal computers, with 18 per cent of the vote. The first ARM-based products were the Acorn Archimedes range introduced in 1987 and the firm has seen recent success thanks to the success of low power chips based on its microprocessor architecture in smartphones and other mobile devices.
DEC's Alpha microprocessor also made a fairly good impression on The INQUIRER's readers, and took 16 per cent of the vote.
Meanwhile, Sun Microsystem's Sparc microprocessor, which was launched in 1987, didn't prove so popular with just four per cent of your votes. IBM's Power chip got just six per cent of the vote, while MIPs processors got a last place three per cent. µ
Share this:
Share
For anybody playing the CISC vs RISC card, that's sooo 1990s.
MOS-6502 Processor?
I seriously doubt their isn't a geek in the world that hasn't cut their teeth on One of those some 30 years ago or so.
ANd probably none so more loved either...
"Most commercially successful" is not the same thing as "favorite".
If you asked people what their favorite store was, should they say Wal-Mart?
x86 is an abomination of an architecture, a hack on top of a hack on top of more hacks on top of a traffic light controller.
Of course, the people who have implemented successive generations of x86 have been highly creative, but as an architecture you have to admire the inherent performance/watt efficiency of ARM. These is a work of genius at the architectural level.
This poll was a bit of a 'gotcha'; for a long time now, the x86 markhitecture has been implemented via microcode running on underlying hardware that is essentially RISC based.
Whilst it made _some_ sense, for backwards compatibility reasons, to enable the extremely inelegant x86 instruction set to function on what is really quite good hardware, it's also just a bit perverse too.
In pure terms, the Alpha and Power architectures really were/are far more elegant solutions.
I've also got to agree with a couple of the other comments in that the vast majority of your readers simply aren't aware of the differences between these architectures.
How can anyone vote the truly appalling x86 architecure above the likes of Motorola 68k, ARM and the 6502?
x86 really is a botched, crap architecture that we should have been free of years ago.
but I do feel that to call it the most popular architecture is a bit like saying the common cold is the favourite virus.
It was out there in front purely because it got to the front first. As someone who made a living out of repairing the crap software people wrote for a crap architecture I'm financially very grateful but as an engineer I wish I'd never seen the bloody thing and we'd have reached the computing capabilities in 1995 using real 32 bit machines and not the 8/16/32 bit melange on an equally screwed OS that we use as a glorified typewriter today.
YOU GUYS ALSO "CONVENIENTLY" NEGLECTED TO INCLUDE THE BEST COMPUTER THAT EVER WAS MADE, NAMELY THE ITANIUM.
FER SHAME!
Unless you are a IT System administrator or have a full-time job in a university or large scale organization, or just a plain geek :), you would not know what a Alpha, Sparc, POWER, PA-RISC, etc, microprocessor are. Does most of the kiddies out there know that the POWER processor and its deriatives power your xbox 360, playstation 3 or wii consoles? Does most of these kids also know that the top computer in the world is the K computer which is powered by Fujitsu Sparc? Or theortically the most powerful computer in the world is the POWER 775 HPC with IBM POWER ? Intel is like the walmart of the chip industry where is caters to 90% of the market, but really is it a better architecture? CISC vs RISC?
53% votes make AMD win in unfair 80% Vs 20% marketshare.
But you didn't give it as an option :(
(insert "insensitive clod" joke here!)
... a little obvious, isn't?
This processor made the PC available world-wide.